Microsoft Provides Twitter Analytics Tool

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Today, Microsoft Tweeted about a Twitter analytics tool. I downloaded it and tried it out…very cool stuff!

Here is what Microsoft Tweeted a little earlier today:

RT @akipekka Wow, this is cool! Twitter analytics tool from Microsoft for @office #MSExcel 2010: http://cot.ag/mKQL7M

It sounded interesting, so I downloaded it and installed it. If you do a lot of Tweeting, it is a very useful tool. It runs in Excel 2010 and uses Power Pivot to arrange the data, and with reports all defined in pivot tables in Excel, it is truly a powerful reporting tool.

Here is how Microsoft describes it:

Microsoft Analytics for Twitter allows users to query Twitter directly in Microsoft® Office Excel 2010. Utilizing the free PowerPivot Excel Add-in users can perform their own analysis such as who are the top Tweeters, what #hashtags are they using and do they have a positive or negative tweet tone. Sample code, used to create this application, is included as a sample and how-to.

Microsoft Analytics for Twitter allows users to search Twitter and get dashboard views on Tweet statistics inside Microsoft® Office Excel 2010.

With this FREE add-in, you can:

Perform up to 5 parallel Twitter Searches (limited to 1500 results per query per day).

Drive ad-hoc analysis of tweets by day, by hour, by tweeters, by #hashtags and @mentions.

Customize your views (using slicers, DAX formulas or reference tables).

Important:

Please note, that, after Installation, Microsoft Analytics for Twitter will manifest itself as a Microsoft® Excel 2010 file called “Microsoft Analytics for Twitter.xlsx” on your desktop.

Please note that Microsoft Analytics for Twitter works only with the latest versions of Microsoft® Excel 2010 and of Microsoft® PowerPivot for Excel 2010. To download Microsoft® PowerPivot for Excel 2010, please go to www.PowerPivot.com.

Please note that Microsoft Analytics for Twitter takes advantage of Twitter Search (http://search.twitter.com/). During periods of high traffic volume Twitter Search does not always return search results. Please be patient and try your search again.

To use it, you simply update a cell with the Twitter accounts that you want to analyze, click the Search button, refresh the Power Pivot data and then update the data in the pivot tables. In less than 5 minutes, you get some useful insight into the last few days of your Twitter activity. I ran @aedney, @jpltim and @jam3ohio, the handles for your humble UsingWindowsHomeServer.Com staff, through the tool. A few sample reports: