What makes a tweet go viral online? And what does a viral trend actually look like?
Those are a couple of the questions that can be answered by a new Microsoft Research project, called Viral Search. The company's researchers are showing the project this week at an internal gathering this week in Redmond. The program crunches large amounts of data from Twitter (and potentially Facebook and other platforms in the future) to analyze and display patterns of distribution on the social network.
No, Blab's new platform can't necessarily predict the future. But what the Seattle-based social analytics company did debut today is software that will help brands determine which of the millions of social media conversations they should focus on.
Using Blab's patented technology, the company analyzes 50,000 news and social media sources, including more than 60 million posts per day. Blab then organizes that information into a "Conversations Canvas dashboard" and predicts where those conversations may go up to three days in the future based on past data and current social media chatter.