There’s a start-up new media analytics firm on the cyberblock for thoseof us track real time stats on the latest brands, music, TV, celebrities, you name it.
Viralheat has exited beta, offering affordable key word-based search and tracking services across video, social media and blogging sites. Rather than purchase its data from third parties, Viralheat has built its own cloud-based network in order to control costs and mine data in near real-time, so says CEO Raj Kadam.
Price: $10 for 10 terms/month, and clients can track uptick of brands on viral video sites and Twitter, with the option to add more exotic analysis products.
Viralheat allows a client to create profiles to track an individual’s name or a company’s name across nearly 30 video sites — and Twitter of course. The platform’s Twitter tool provides data on how many total mentions an item had on Twitter for the week and for the given day, the most active Twitter user who has Tweet about a brand, the most common language of Tweets, percentage of Tweets about a brand that are ReTweets, the most active day of the week for mention of a brand and a sentiment breakdown of Tweets. For example, a profile created for “Obama” shows there were just over 7,000 tweets today including the name “Obama,” and over 32,000 total Tweets this week. The service also provides a graph of the number of Tweets over the past week and shows the most recent Tweets about the item updated in real-time, which you can Tweet out directly from Viralheat’s platform or email to others.
“Huh?” you say. “ReTweet? Whodat?” If you’re not using Twitter, you won’t know, but ReTweeting (RT in the vernacular) is when your followers re-post your tweet to their followers, and others re-retweet it and so on — this is viral information spreading at its finest and simplest form. Mashable.com explains the ins and outs of the ReTweet here. It’s a digital form of word-of-mouth advertising.
ReTweeting is a rich source of data for the type of analysis Viralheat is offering: a larger number of ReTweets are posted every day, pertaining to nearly every imaginable topic and Twitter’s API gives us the ability to quantify and map viral behavior in a way that has never been possible before. Get your free API key, finding information, loading databases, ensuring accuracy, keeping it current. Time-consuming work that gets in the way of improving your product.