The media + communication studies network

Query: Twitter research techniques

Can anyone help with these problems?

I want to search old tweets (from May 09) by hashtag.

Using Google advanced search I have found tweets for that month (I understand that every tweet ever sent is now cached on Google), but Google doesn't recognise hashtags, so I am unable to refine my search.

1. How do you get Google to recognise hashtags?

2. Is there any simple way to use a sentiment measure like Social Mention on old tweets, e.g. for May 09?

Thanks in advance

Andrew Hobbs

University of Central Lancashire

Tags: Twitter, methods, old, research, tweets

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Josh Greenberg on November 2, 2010 at 11:48

Crimson Hexagon is a program that allows you to search archived tweets by hashtags and other themes/categories. When it first launched you could access a free trial version to allow you to conduct basic sentiment analysis - not sure if this is still possible, or if you can purchase trial versions for lower rates. Warning: it's a great program but costly (probably beyond means of a single researcher but a research institute/department may be able to afford a site license). If you are monitoring new events, campaigns, topics, etc. there is good freeware available for archiving and providing basic analytics. I used both Twapper Keeper and The Archivist recently for an election monitoring study and found them to be very good.

Permalink Reply by Gina M. Chen on November 3, 2010 at 12:40

Here is a list of 10 tools to search old tweets. I haven't tried any, so I can't vouch for them. A link to this post was tweeted by someone I know, so may be worth checking out.

Good luck. (And if you find out a tool that works great -- or one that stinks -- please post here at SMR). I bet many of us would love to know the answer to your question.

Permalink Reply by Katie Sayers on November 4, 2010 at 9:25

Hi,

I would love to find a solution to this problem too.!I did read a great blog on how to import twitter searches into excel using an RSS feed. If you set this up, in theory, it will pull all the data you set up for a given search and then you can search via excel to find the information you need. The example shows how to pull data for your account name but I'm wondering if it will work via a hashtag too as your hashtag search will have it's own RSS feed. The blog is here: http://news.office-watch.com/t/n.aspx?a=843 . If you try it, let me know if it works.

Katie

Permalink Reply by Gina M. Chen on November 6, 2010 at 19:21

Just came across this new tool for searching Tweets and Facebook status updates. Thought it might be useful to your or others.

Also, some other tools I hadn't heard of that I'd like to try.

Permalink Reply by Katie Sayers on November 8, 2010 at 10:52

Hi, I've just posted this link in the comments section but they may be something here:

Permalink Reply by Siobhan O'Flynn on November 8, 2010 at 15:20

I just looked at the link posted by Gina M. Chen below to 10 tools & Topsy works beautifully - I've pulled up 5,000+ tweets with the hash tag I'm researching & will be archiving data. The original post from Aug 2010 notes that Topsy (at that time) searched back to May 2008, so archive that data now!

Permalink Reply by Siobhan O'Flynn on November 8, 2010 at 15:21

that would be: http://topsy.com

Permalink Reply by Andrew Hobbs on November 8, 2010 at 18:18

Thanks for all your helpful suggestions.

Topsy seems the best for searching old tweets on a particular topic, but even then, it's not much use for my research ... it doesn't seem able to search for a particular time-slot, e.g. a particular week in 2009, only ‘before’ or 'after’ a given date. Neither does it filter by language. Its greatest weakness is that its archive of old tweets seems far from complete.

Does anyone know why Google stopped their superb ‘replay’ function, which searched across all tweets ever sent?