Imagine you are an event manager who has spent the past few months planning a conference, lining up speakers, and coordinating catering, venues, and transportation. The big week is approaching, and you want to make sure everything goes smoothly. You want to understand what is well received and respond to negative sentiment immediately. You want to recognize which topics related to your event are trending and how those change across time. You want to easily find your biggest influencers, fans and critics.
In August, Microsoft announced the release of the brand and campaign management solution template on Twitter. This allows you to set up sophisticated analytics that answer all of those questions.
Whether you manage an event, product, or marketing campaign, you can use Power BI’s template to quickly and easily do analytics on top of Twitter data. All you will need to get started are Twitter credentials, the search terms you want to track, and an Azure subscription. (If you don’t have one, Vorsite can help you get started!)
Getting Started
The first part is an installer that guides you through setting up a solution template. The installer will prompt you for Twitter and Azure credentials, and ask you for the search terms in which you are interested. After that, all you have left to do is hit Run, wait a few minutes for it to set up, and download a Power BI Desktop file that comes with pre-defined reports.
The solution template spins up a total of three Azure Services:
- A “Logic App” that pulls Twitter data in real time
- An “Azure Function” that enriches each tweet using machine learning
- An Azure SQL database which comes with a pre-defined schema for your Twitter data
As soon as the solution template gets spun up, Logic Apps will start scanning for new tweets and you should almost immediately see data appear inside your Power BI reports.
The Template
The Twitter template originated from an amazing collaboration between a solution template team and Microsoft researchers. Microsoft researchers have spent time creating a “Social Command Center” and authoring sophisticated custom visuals like the network graph below:
The Twitter solution template leverages a number of components from the “Social Command Center” and packages them up for users to easily consume. Reports like the one above allow users to effortlessly explore networks of interconnected authors and hashtags. It becomes easy to organically spot patterns of trending topics, and slice data by authors and time.
The data has also been enriched through natural language processing techniques like sentiment analysis. This means the template can help users quickly identify areas of concern, such as authors who are consistently posting negative tweets about campaigns or products. You can even drill down into the raw tweets using the “Strippet Browser” visual created by the Microsoft research team.
Extensibility
Every part of the solution template is also completely extensible and customizable. Vorsite can help you out today with additional requirements such as mashing up data from other sources like Facebook, enriching your data using ML techniques like entity extraction or correlate your data with campaigns.
If you have questions regarding the solution template or need help setting it up, feel free to contact us at sales@vorsite.com or (206) 781-1797
