Microsoft Analytics for Twitter

Here is a great new free tool from Microsoft that plugs directly into Excel. Although this isn’t really a UC product as such I still find it useful and interesting for helping run my blog and other social network activities. In the example I did below I did a simple hash tag search on #lync and #jabber to see which of the two is generating more interest on Twitter. No surprises for which one came out on top.

With the recent interest in social mining of sites like Twitter I though this was an interesting free tool and worth talking about.

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).

Limitations

• Twitter search queries are limited to the past 4 - 7 days and a maximum of 1500 tweets per day.
• Available for Excel 2010 only.

You need to download the Twitter plugin for Excel as well as Power Pivot for Excel which are both free.

Twitter plugin:

http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=26213

Power Pivot for Excel:

http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=7609

Sample hash tag search:

VoIPNorm