How to do research on a new idea/target industry using Twitter

I just thought of sharing a technique I have been using lately for collecting knowledge on target industry or a new tool/startup idea

For example, you have been trying to something in online backups (a purely hypothetical example).

First, come up with top 3 relevant keywords that people search for while thinking of online backups. You may use Google insights for search.

Here are the relevant keywords I found: “online backups”, “data backups”, “server backups”

Now here is the juicy part. Go to Twitter search and for each of your keyword, search on following themes:

• What people like: search combination of keyword with words “like”, “love”, “great”, “cool”, “:)”. Example – “online backup” “love”
• What people dislike: search for “hate”, “sucks”, “:(”, “bad”, “worst”
• What people want: search for “want”, “wish”, “if only”, “lacking”

This will give you a pretty good idea of what people like, dislike and want in this particular industry. And if you spot patterns, you could have tremendous insight.

Further exploration:

• Expand your set of keywords
• Do the same three sets of searches for competitors/leaders in that industry
• Don’t just limit till Twitter, do Google blog search also

Any more ideas? More terms for searching likes, dislikes and wants? Now if someone could just make an app for simplifying this. Anyone?

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This entry was posted on October 30th, 2009 and is filed under Entrepreneurship, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or Trackback from your own site.