Measuring Market Sentiment On Twitter

I’m always fascinated with Twitter tools. Some have been just blah and some could prove to be genuinely useful. I found Twendz last week and been watching a few topics through it. It’s fast becoming one of my favorite social network conversation mining tools.

Twitter trends are nothing new. Twitter itself has introduced trending topics in their search or you can look up the current hot topics on TwitScoop.com while those certainly are interesting and gives you some idea what’s on people’s minds, it doesn’t really tell you how people feel about those topics. You’d have to watch it for a while to get an idea what people’s sentiments are. Even then it’s more or less guess work.

Twendz attempts to calculate how people actually feel about the topic by comparing keywords in a tweet with a “dictionary” of words which are typically associated with positive or negative sentiments. Each keyword is given a score and that score is aggregated. So as you watch a topic, you’ll actually see the percentage of positives (green) and negatives (red). While this may not be scientifically accurate, it does seem like a good at-a-glance method to gauge the interest of the market. Of the few topics I’ve checked out on it, it seems to reflect the overall mood well.