3 Aggregation Tools For Tracking Tweets

Looking to find out how popular your blog post was on Twitter? Want to know what tweets people really enjoy? Well, these Twitter-based applications can help you see the most popular trends on Twitter by aggregating tweets.

1. Tweetmeme

By far the most popular tweet aggregator, Tweetmeme lists the most popular links on Twitter. Much like Digg, the stories can then be viewed across 40+ different categories and also segmented by Images, News or Video. The top URLs for the day can be easily located in the popular sections. A user history can be found if you select a username, so you can see how many tweets each of the last ten links in a given user’s Twitter stream has received.

Tweetmeme offers an attractive button for your website that can help to gather retweets and let visitors know which stories are the most popular. A “chicklet” is also offered to showcase the entire number of tweets for a domain rather than a story so visitors can see the best historical tweets. If you want to bring some of the top links to your site, then the Tweetmeme widget can quickly allow you to customize and easily integrate elsewhere.

How it works

Tweetmeme scans Twitter and logs links from all of the Twitter accounts. Then it decodes shortened links so it can attribute a real number to the destination article. The following URL shorteners are supported:

• bit.ly
• awe.sm
• cli.gs
• digg.com
• is.gd
• TinyURL.com
• tr.im
• su.pr
• ow.ly
• lopurls.us
• twurl.nl

Webmasters should simply place the Tweetmeme button on their site, then sit back and watch the tweets roll in!

2. Twitturly

The Twitturly service acts just like Tweetmeme, but the overall interface is scaled back. There are no categories or widgets, but a few unique features make Twitturly a very helpful tool. The “profiles” tab allows users to type in their name and see the stats on all of their tweets (not just 10). Another helpful search that can be performed is a “My Top 100” search that will fetch the top 100 links tweeted by your followers so you can get an consensus on the most popular links from the people you follow.

How it works

The profile and top 100 searches simply leverage the Twitter API and store the data. The number of tweets on a link is said to count all shortened links:

“We always count the “votes” correctly because our spiders actually visit every single site before it gets displayed here.”

3. Twittl

Twittl is an interesting platform that allows users to submit their favorite tweets rather than simply aggregating links from Twitter. This site is extremely original in the fact that it allows users to not only submit and vote on the best actual tweets, but also puts them in context with the description and to comment on the specific tweets.

How it works

Users must submit the specific tweet to Twittl and assign it a title and a description. Then users can vote for that tweet or they could bury that tweet (a negative vote). The tweets that have the most votes are promoted to the popular page, while those that lack the proper voting support stay in the “upcoming stories” section.

Twittl could become popular in the near future for celebrity information as the tweets themselves are newsworthy. So someone could summit Oprah’s first ever tweet then another user could submit Shaq’s response and the conversation could begin in the comments.

These different applications are really helping to make Twitter easier to navigate from a news standpoint, as the top stories and tweets are being aggregated into an easy-to-consume format. With more and more beneficial sites popping up like these, just look for Twitter to keep growing in popularity as users keep receiving more and more relevant information.