Wednesday, September 25, 2013

Animated Heat Maps of Twitter Trends


Vertabox is a social media monitoring service that can track how topics trend on social media and display an animated heat map of where and when the topic trends on Twitter. Vertabox will allow you to enter any topic and visualize on a Google Map how the topic trends and spreads geographically throughout any given day.

The site is currently in beta but it already contain examples of animated heat maps for a number of different topics. For example, a celebrity map tracks the activity of Tweets mentioning 'celebrity' in the USA. If you press the play button you can watch the heat map animate as it displays where the word 'celebrity' was most Tweeted during the course of the day.

Vertabox includes the option to visualize two distinct heat maps of the trending topic. The 'absolute' option shows the total number of Tweets over the day, you can therefore visualize where 'celebrity' was Tweeted in absolute terms over the course of the day. The 'relative' option displays an hour-by -hour heat map of Tweets, which enables you to see the relative popularity of Tweets mentioning 'celebrity' for any hour during the day.

Vertabox also includes a calendar option that allows you to view animated heat maps of the topic for any specific day. It is also possible to view a word map that shows the most popular words used in the mapped Tweets and view which were the top Tweets related to the searched topic.

No comments: