Stream historical and real-time social metrics, insights, and content from 450 million tweets per day directly into applications
SAN FRANCISCO – Topsy, the premier social analytics platform for real-time discovery and marketing, today launched a new set of social data APIs that give brands, agencies, media, and developers the ability to integrate social metrics, insights, and content from any time period or in real time directly into applications, social dashboards, and more. Topsy’s social data APIs fuel a wide array of solutions, including Twitter’s Election Hub and TheTruth.com’s social voting application.
“Our new social data APIs turn the Twitter Firehose into high-value streams of enriched metrics and content that companies can easily use in their applications, products, and other solutions,” says Jamie de Guerre, SVP of product and marketing at Topsy. “By doing the heavy lifting of analysis and enrichment for developers, we’re looking to unlock the power of real-time social conversations and catalyze more widespread usage of this information.”
Topsy APIs offer:
• Real-time counts, measurements, and analysis for any term going back three years, which gives users powerful tools for understanding the social conversation around past campaigns or events
• High-level insights that can only be gleaned from analyzing the entire Firehose in real time—including top content for any geography, additional terms related to a particular conversation, social sharing statistics for websites, and the key experts for any topic at any time
• Geo-inferencing and filtering capabilities that enable a wide array of location-specific applications, such as rapidly building target lists for location-specific campaigns or finding local influencers to engage for grassroots efforts
Twitter leveraged Topsy’s metrics APIs during the 2012 U.S. presidential election to create the Twitter Political Index (or Twindex), which provided a daily gauge of voters’ sentiment for each candidate, as expressed on Twitter. Using mentions of their last name or direct @mentions of their Twitter handle, the Twindex tracked sentiment for Obama and Romney from May 1 until Election Day, tracking when each gained momentum in the race.
Twitter also used Topsy’s content and metrics API data to create a custom dashboard to help capture the nuance of public opinion. It offered a way to immediately gauge the public’s reaction to highlights and bumps, such as the reaction to the debates, to Obama’s initial debate performance and Romney’s comments regarding Big Bird and “binders full of women” in subsequent editions.
“Thanks to Topsy APIs, we were able to offer a unique, unprecedented way of looking at the 2012 election. Topsy’s metrics and analytics helped to tell the story of the presidential election as it evolved in real time based on Twitter users’ perspectives,” said Adam Sharp, Head of Government and Non-Profits at Twitter.
Arnold Worldwide used Topsy’s API to develop a social voting application for TheTruth.com that educated teens about the dangers of smoking and the tobacco industry. TheTruth.com used real-time hashtag voting to engage its audience and provide young visitors with compelling, real-time content.
“The Topsy API made the social voting component of TheTruth.com easy. Our CMS integrates well with the service, allowing flexibility in our search terms, so adding real time search terms and elements is quick and instantaneous,” said Tyler Sanborn, Digital Producer at Arnold Worldwide. “This is largely important in my day-to-day so I can focus on all other elements of the client relationship and rest assured that this component of the campaign metric is handled by a robust system.”
New APIs include:
Metrics APIs
• Instant exact counts for any term or set of terms, hashtag, Twitter handle, or phrase
• Tweet counts, sentiment scores, geographic distribution of mentions, and potential impressions
Insights APIs
• Instant discovery of influencers related to a topic
• Related terms discovery
Content APIs
• Instant access to relevance-ranked lists of top content
• Top tweets, links, photos, and videos, as well as URL and author analysis
• Real-time streaming and on-demand (synchronous-response) modes
• Instantly historical results for both recent seconds and multiple years
About Topsy
Topsy is the premier social analytics platform for real-time discovery and marketing. By giving customers the power to explore any question or topic using real-time public social data, Topsy helps to uncover unexpected insights and answer critical questions.
Many of the largest global brands, advertising agencies, media organizations, and technology companies use Topsy as their day-to-day social dashboard. Topsy gives them instant, meaningful insights into a wide variety of questions—everything from spotting emerging trends and surfacing real-time marketing opportunities to optimizing social presence during live events. And because Topsy’s index of social data extends back several years, organizations can also use it to analyze long-term trends and understand how conversations have changed over time.
Learn more at about.topsy.com.
