5 Websites You Can Use To Spot Twitter Trends For Market Research

There are a ton of web applications, Twitter accounts, and even iPhone, Android, iPad (or insert whatever else) apps that can help people do everything from track popular hashtags to graph out recent Twitter trends. As Twitter grows, this information will only become more useful for understanding what is popular at any given moment, or even what was popular in the past.

As a marketer I thrive, no wait, I live by utilizing any tool I can get my beedy little eyes on that will uncover and reveal hot new trends, market research and demographics. The more tools I acquire at my disposal across the web, the better advantage I have on capitalizing and monetizing around popular subjects that people start searching heavily for yet keyword tools can detect without at least 30 days worth of data.

As they say... "Early bird gets the worm".

Here are 5 Twitter tools I use for watching hot trends and I use for market research. These are awesome to use with CPA Offers (especially free lead generation offers like short form submits, email/zip submits, etc...)

1. Twitter Search - Pretty damn basic and of course, it's from Twitter itself so of course I take advantage of this. The simplest way to see trends on Twitter is on their official search page. Hot trends on Twitter appear on the search page and on the Twitter homepage, and clicking any will bring up a feed of the public conversation.



2. Hashtages.org - The popular webpage on Twitter hashtags also provides graphs on hashtag use just by hovering over the hashtag. There are also pages that show the most popular and newest hashtags, but their uptime is a bit unstable in my opinion. However, it's still a great tool to use for "anticipation". Hashtags.org is the defacto standard for hashtag information. The # symbol, called a hashtag, is used to mark keyword or topic in a Tweet. Any Twitter user can categorize or follow topics with hashtags.



3. Trendistic - Trendistic is a tool that allows you to track trends on Twitter, similarly to what Google Trends does for Google searches. It gathers tweets as they are posted, filters redundant ones and compiles the rest into one-hour intervals. This way, it shows how the frequency of one, two, three and four-word phrases fluctuate over time. The result is a visualization of what is popular and what is not among Twitter users, and how certain events are reflected or even predicted by the microblogosphere.

You can enter a phrase (topic) in the Trendistic search box to see how its frequency varies over time, or several different topics separated by commas to see how they relate (each topic will show in the chart with a specific color): try comparing 'dinner' and 'breakfast' or 'morning' and 'night' for instance, to see how powerful it can be. I search Katy Perry cuz she's hot.



4. TweetMeme - Find the most popular links on Twitter. Tweetmeme is the epicenter link sharing on the service. TweetMeme is a service which aggregates all the popular links on Twitter to determine which links are popular. TweetMeme categorises these links into Categories, Subcategories and Channels, making it easy to filter out the noise to find what you're interested in.



5. Monitter - Monitter is a real time twitter search tool that enables you to monitor a set of keywords on twitter. It also allows you to narrow the search to a particular geographic location, allowing you to find out what's going onin a particular part of the world. To begin: just type a search term into the box above and click the "add column" button - or, if you prefer, click on the "Trending" link to load three columns with current twitter trends in them.