Research.ly – Dig Into the Online Community

Whether you’re interested in biking, books, or bartenders in Budapest, Research.ly is a web-app that can help you connect with people who are interested in the very same things. The “instant community builder” lets people see what social media users are saying on Twitter in real-time. While individual users might look at Research.ly as a way of finding new friends with similar hobbies, entrepreneurs and marketing professionals can use Research.ly to peek inside the minds of their customers and find out what young, savvy consumers are really talking about online.

Although you can use Research.ly as a way to find likeminded people in your local community, the web-app’s real power shines through when looking at it from a business standpoint. Anyone can create an account with Research.ly to begin searching for tweets about any topic imaginable. Tweets can be filtered initially by city, keyword, gender, or sentiment—either positive or negative. Let’s say you’re a PR rep for a new shoe company in Chicago who wants to know how consumers are reacting to your company’s latest product release. Log into your Research.ly account and search for the name of your brand to see all the times it has been mentioned on Twitter. To get even more detailed data, you can filter those tweet mentions by geographic location – to view only those tweets that came from shoppers in Chicago – as well as gender. Look to the right of the scrolling list of tweets to see charts and graphs detailing global feedback and overall sentiment for your brand. You can also view the most popular URLs and hashtags associated with all the tweets that mention your company by name.

Among the many interesting features that Research.ly provides is the ability to search tweets that are up to three years old, which makes it much easier to analyze whether public sentiment has changed over time. The web-app also makes it possible to create relationship maps that show how two Twitter users are connected, along with instant analytics tools that allow users to compare the most popular videos or photos being posted on Twitter at any time. With all this information in mind, business professionals can create highly effective ad campaigns that address the real issues being expressed by consumers on the web.