• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, October 20, 2015

Union Metrics found a way to bring nine years of Twitter data into a reporting platform that allows advertisers to search and sort through previously tweeted content.

Echo makes the entire Twitter archive -- with hundreds of billions of tweets down to the second -- easily searchable in real-time, making the actual content available to view. The tweet achieve provides insight into what consumers thought about brands or organizations during specific events or as a brand crisis unfolded.

Political marketers also can use the platform to analyze how politicians did during a debate by analyzing how people react to statements. During the Democratic debate, the platform registered voter sentiment of candidate responses to the facilitator's questions. In one hour of the debate there were about 799,000 tweets.

During a two-month beta trial, about 25 brands and media agencies -- including Digitas Health LifeBrands and Stradella Road -- tested the platform. They used it to research potential clients before pitching new business, identify key tweets about past events, measuring share of voice, and monitoring their competitors.

For example, the platform will enable brands to search on information and identify specific consumers tweeting about "low blood sugar" to help them better understand how people with diabetes actually live with the disease.   

Bleacher Report uses the Echo search engine to determine what people talk about on Twitter during a sporting event. They feed the data to content writers, so they can create relevant articles that resonate with sports fans.

The dashboard provides users with a visual view of the tweets as the technology processes tens of thousands of data points in the browser, which was the biggest challenge, according to Hayes Davis, CEO of Union Metrics. Many thousands of lines of custom code drive the process. He refers to the visual graph as a seismic graph, because it shows the exact moment the topic spikes on Twitter. It creates an interactive exploratory interface.