A free and simple brand monitoring tool for Twitter

• Chris Norton
• 3 December 2009
• Categories: Public Relations & Social Media Training
• Tags: Twitter app, Twitter Tool

I have been talking about Twitter quite a bit recently on a number of blogs that I have the pleasure to write on. I don’t share everything on my own blog but I think this tool is worth sharing if you like using free tools for monitoring purposes.

Tweet Cloud is a well produced free tool which lets you see a topic cloud of the most used words on Twitter around one particular term or phrase. As a vanity exercise I tested it out on my own name and you can see the results below. I was quite amused that coffee and Yorkshire were topics I refer to quite a bit. I would be interested to see some of my friends own clouds.

I think this could be pretty useful, when brand managers or business owners, want to see what is being said about their company nice and quickly. As with all category or tag clouds you can click on the relevant term and actually see the individual tweets themselves. So if a company has a disgruntled customer who has vented their fury on Twitter and made a bit of a splash for instance this could be pretty useful. The cloud function is pretty similar to other more advanced social media monitoring tools that I use such as Radian6 which creates clouds from most types of social media.

The best approach should always be to monitor your Twitter channel closely, so you or your company can deal with any customer questions or feedback nice and swiftly.

Finally, the best bit (as a bit of a geek) is that you can actually turn your own topic Tweet Cloud into a bespoke widget and share it on your blog or website, so your customers or employees can see the latest top topics associated with you or your brand. I think that is a very nice little function indeed and I am sure quite a few people would want to use it.