Tracking trends with Social Media

Companies are becoming very interested in what customers are saying about them on popular social media sites. Important newsmedia companies are also taking this further by developing sophisticated trend analysis tools.

The US based Financial Times offers NewsSift This service uses a custom built search engine to organize questions by topic, organization, location and person. Web surfers can also use tools such as Tweetfeel which uses "insanely complex sentiment analysis" techniques to aid in uncovering trends. The competitor Twitrratr also attempts to unravel whats hot and whats not on the microblogging site.

The sites are interesting but not always accurate, simply because they are based on logic and algorithms, rather than human judgement. While they can be useful, its wise to take what they reveal with a grain of salt.