Tools Tuesday: The Archivist
January 24th, 2012And we’re back! It’s the first review of the New Year, and we have the perfect tool to help you be better looking, better organised and an all-round better social media force in 2012! … It’s The Archivist.
As the year that was 2011 came to a bumpy end, newspapers, TV stations and blogs were full of those lists – the top tens and top one hundreds of the political events/albums/YouTube videos of cats that rocked the world. It’s one of those funny urges we have as human beings to look back and sum things up, to save and review and re-arrange out memories. We can talk about what happened and make plans to do it better this year.
When it comes to social media and the online word in general, the possibilities for looking back are bigger than ever before. Everything that has been said and done online stays there, which on the one hand is a bit terrifying, but on the other creates exciting possibilities for review. Tweets and topics can be tracked, found and organised, by issue, by least to most shared, and not just for posterity or nostalgia’s sake – the potential for improving what we do there on the basis of what has and hasn’t worked in the past is very real. It can also give you something tangible to show for what you’ve done, which is a rare victory in social media, and definitely has its uses.
Image: The Archivist, from http://www.techi.com/2010/06/microsoft-unleashes-the-archivist/
What’s it all about?
The Archivist is a service that uses the Twitter Search API to find and archive or save tweets. By entering certain keywords or hashtags, you can monitor and store all the relevant Tweets. The Archivist then uses this data to make nice graphs for you – top 10 tweets, top users, top words or URLs, tweet versus retweet ratio.
The guys behind the service ( Mix Online at Microsoft) are clear in pointing out that The Archivist doesn’t have access to the Twitter ‘firehose’, i.e. all of the tweets ever tweeted, so the data that is presented serves as a representation of general trends, rather than being completely exhaustive. There is also a three archive limit, but see below for a handy trick to get around this (sssh!)
Why should you be interested?
By archiving tweets in this way, you can essentially analyse the success of a Twitter campaign or presence. You can use this data, and particularly the oh-so-lovely graphs to find out who’s sharing your content, what’s popular and what you need to work on. It’s also possible to export the graphs into reports, or share them with your networks online to show how you’re doing. You can learn form your successes, you failures, and crucially, from your audience (and explain to your bosses what you’re doing right).
How it works:
- 1. Download the software if you’re using the desktop version, or set up your online account.
- Set the #hashtags that you want to track.
- Charts will be automatically generated by The Archivist – you can chose to make them ‘public’ to share with your network, or ‘private’ to keep records that only you can see.
- Copy and paste the charts into internal reports or export your saved tweets to a tab delimited text file and view the information in Excel.
- Run charts, graphs, or other analysis on the tweets and discover trends.
- Click on the charts to go to the source documents (e.g. profile of specific Twitter users) or to get more detailed information.
“Backdoor” allowing a user to bypass the three archive limit:
- Sign out of The Archivist
- Enter the term you want to start archiving
- Click ’save’ – this will prompt you to sign in and, once you sign in, the archive will be saved – clever, eh?
The downsides
Because it doesn’t have access to the firehose, there is limited possibility for backtracking or searching for things that have been said in the past – the tracking of tweets begins in earnest once the project begins.
It also only works with Twitter, so if that’s not where your audience are, this one might not be for you.
The upshot
This tool is free, easy and really useful. It’s worth putting the time in to setting up archives, particularly if you’re running a campaign on Twitter. You might not realise it immediately, but you will find at some point that you want this data, and sourcing it afterwards is not fun. Plus the graphs are pretty, did we mention that?
So get started this New Year. Just like keeping a diary or saving your receipts, you’ll be glad you did.
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