Pulsar Launches "Google Trends" for Social Media

Audience intelligence platform Pulsar has launched a new product that lets users map real-time and historical trends instantly with access to 12 years worth of public data, from the very first Tweet back in March 2006 to today.

Pulsar TRENDS helps users to easily understand what audiences all around the world are excited by, and how the conversation changes over days, months or even years. Did the focus of the Brexit conversation shift over the last 18 months? And how did the buzz around Beyoncé's Coachella performance spread around the globe? What are people most excited about when it comes to the upcoming FIFA World Cup?

Pulsar TRENDS shows how social media discussions play out globally from country to country, and even at city level, helping marketers to understand where certain themes, perceptions and ideas might resonate, and where they won't.

The innovative tool has access to 12 years of publicly available Twitter data and lets users perform queries by keyword, URL or audience. For marketers this means being able to quickly demonstrate what captured the imagination of the public at different moments in time, providing the seeds of creative ideas for future marketing and communications campaigns and content. For researchers and analysts this means being able to quickly test a research hypothesis before setting up a more in-depth study, using listening tools such as Pulsar TRAC.

TRENDS is the first Pulsar product to be commercialised with a freemium model: users are able to access real-time TRENDS for free and only have to purchase a subscription to access historical TRENDS. Subscribers have access to unlimited data and unlimited queries for a flat 12 month fee which makes the user experience extremely flexible.

Pulsar TRENDS has been in private beta for the first three months of 2018. One Pulsar customer who has been beta testing TRENDS, is already building the tool into its audience intelligence program at a global financial institution. ING's Social Dialogue Manager, Armand Roeplall said:

"The exciting part about TRENDS is the easiness and speed of getting a real-time view of the current social dialogue. By being part of the discussion at an early stage, we're able to provide key background information to relevant topics. The faster we are able to identify rising trends, the faster we can reach the most relevant audience with content geared toward the discussion."

Pulsar TRENDS is simple to use. There is no complex set up or search strings required - the tool allows users to search social media in the same way that they would search the web. This ease of use means that a variety of topics can easily be searched and compared to uncover correlations and disparities between different themes without the need for complex Boolean syntax. Better still, using advanced AI, the results are categorised by industry verticals so that they can be understood by sector, for example, health, automotive, beauty or politics.

Francesco D'Orazio, co-founder at Pulsar said:

"Just like search engines opened up the web and made it explorable, we designed Pulsar TRENDS to be the easiest and fastest way to explore the world of social media.

"We've been working for years with thousands of planners, analysts and researchers to help them find the story in the data. One of the key things we realised was missing from the market is a tool that supports quick iteration, which is essential when using data for creative thinking. With TRENDS we are introducing a search experience that combines speed, simplicity and scale, enabling a trial and error approach to exploring social data that makes it ideal for creative strategy and planning use cases."

SOURCE Pulsar