When you’re stuck for content ideas, make sure you have Topsy handy in your blogger’s toolkit. Topsy functions as a social search engine and gives you insights into what people are talking about across years of conversations on millions of websites.
This free social media analytics tool parses data from social networking sources including Twitter, Google Plus, LiveJournal, and a multitude of other sites. Topsy’s main focus is analyzing messages sent through Twitter, which means that over 425 billion tweets sent since 2006 are at your disposal. Using this tool, you can analyze trending topics, find out what people find interesting and relevant, and thus, have the ability to optimize your content by taking advantage of this wealth of data.
So let’s delve into some of Topsy’s features and use “cookies” as our search query. (Because who doesn’t love cookies?)
With Topsy’s Social Search feature, you have the option to narrow your search to just links, tweets, photos, videos, or influencers. Influencers are chosen based on Topsy’s algorithms and are personas who have garnered above-average engagement on the social web. You can look at the types of content that these key influencers are sharing regarding any given topic.
Let’s look at everything related to discussions about cookies on the public social web. Over the course of the past day, there have been 43,566 tweets about cookies. The search term “cookies” has a sentiment score of 71 out of 100, meaning people really like cookies and are quite enthusiastic about them. If I had to guess, the high sentiment score is based on the delicious baked good kind of cookie and not the website kind…
Topsy allows you to further tailor your search by time and language. You can also use an advanced search feature to make your search even more specific.
Tired of reading about chocolate chip cookies? No problem! Eliminate them from your search results. Now you can analyze what people are talking about that’s related to all other types of cookies aside from the (yawn) mainstream chocolate chip. Play around with Topsy’s “advanced search” function to help you narrow the focus of your blog content.
Okay, okay. Maybe not everyone loves cookies. Let’s go over Topsy’s Social Analytics feature by comparing cookies, cupcakes, and brownies so we can cover all of our baked-goods bases. This feature allows you to compare the number of tweets for up to three queries over the past month. If you’re trying to choose between topics based on relevance, you can use this feature to analyze which topic is most highly discussed on Twitter.
Looks like cookies take the cake…
Another resourceful feature is Topsy’s Social Trends, which collects the most influential online discussions based on the number of tweets they’ve generated. What exactly is it about cookies that people are interested in?
Lastly, you can set up alerts for certain topics, brands, companies, hashtags, etc. You’ll receive a daily email with all the top results from the public social web of your chosen search term. This way, you can stay on top of the conversation and keep trending topics on your radar.
Hopefully, you feel more equipped to find content ideas, and I didn’t only make you crave cookies. Topsy is a powerful tool that can give you insightful data into what people really care about, what they’d like to read more about, and what they’re interested in sharing. It’s time to add Topsy to your blogger’s toolkit.
