This is the second of four innovative tools we're looking at in the Better Twitter Analytics series, seeking a new way of looking at data to help you shape and improve your nonprofit's social media strategy.
Among the new Twitter analytics tools, TweetPsych stands out because it comes at the data from a very different
perspective — analysing the words used in your last
1000 tweets to present a “psychological profile” and to suggest
other Twitter users who "think like you."
As the tool's creator, Dan Zarrella (author of The Social Media Marketing Book), explains it:
TweetPsych uses the LIWC and RID [linguistic analysis
methods] to build a psychological profile of a person based on
the content of their Tweets… [and] works best on users who have
posted more than 1000 updates. It is also better suited for running
analyses on accounts that are operated by a single user and use
Twitter in a conversational manner, rather than simply a content
distribution platform.
… I think the possibilities of a system like this are
enormous, from matching like-minded users to identifying users
that exhibit certain useful or desirable traits.
TweetPsych breaks down your Twitter content in two broad categories — Cognitive Content and Primordial, Conceptual and Emotional Content
— and shows you the characteristics for which you’ve scored
higher than the average Twitter user. That is, “The score indicates how much more often you
tweeted something that matched each feature than the baseline.”
Interesting!
But is TweetPsych a must-have tool for your nonprofit organization?
Not so much.
Granted, TweetPsych is still in beta (very much still under development),
but it would be helpful to have more information attached to the
numbers and labels — an explanation for those of us whose undergrad
psychology courses are now little more than a foggy memory. As is,
it’s difficult to assess what this tool is telling us, and what actions
we might take as a result. And remember, numbers are only as good as what they can tell us about what "next action" we might take to be more effective in reaching our goals!
Add to that the fact that many of us stray far from our natural
language patterns in trying to fit a message (but, often, a link and/or
someone else’s username) into a 140-character limit. And, of course, the tool is designed for individual use, whereas many nonprofits on Twitter have an aggregate
account, where several staffers or volunteers share the task of
creating the content…Well, you can see the challenges here.
My suggestion?
Have a peek at TweetPsych, by all means — if only for another way of looking at your Twitter content, and maybe a general sense of how you’re coming across on
Twitter — but I think you’ll glean more actionable ideas from DanZarrella.com, the blog.
Do check out 5 Steps to Going Viral on Twitter (a guest post at CopyBlogger.com), too, as well as this video of Zarrella’s recent HubSpot webinar, The Science of Social Media Marketing.