After eight years of providing social analytics and search information, the Topsy team has announced via Twitter that they have officially searched their last tweet.
Topsy appeared to have a bright future when Apple purchased it for more than $200 million two years ago, but the service’s useful life began to fall apart very quickly. In fact, Apple began shuttering the premium accounts in 2014 when they made the decision to stop allowing new people to sign up for Topsy Pro Analytics. Before Apple got involved, Topsy created three notable social search and analytics tools that proved there is a market for this type of research. The SXSW Trendspotter, Twitter Oscars Index and Twitter Political Index were all popular methods of showcasing the power of Topsy’s technology.
Apple’s purchase was confusing to many industry experts because the company was already involved in a partnership with Twitter. Due to this, many began to speculate that Topsy had been acquired to provide Apple with access to engineers or technology to improve some of its own products. For example, some people assumed that Topsy’s technology would be used to improve the iTunes Store. It has also been rumored that the iOS search function benefited from Topsy talent and technology.
It is still unknown if the Topsy acquisition helped Apple in any specific behind-the-scenes way. And now it is possible that Apple will never reveal the reason it paid $200 million for a company only to shut it down a mere two years later. Perhaps the long list of Topsy competitors simply made the company an unwise investment that was too expensive to keep operational. Either way, businesses that have built their marketing strategy around social analytics are not in any danger of losing this edge. Topsy has plenty of competition out there to meet your social analytics needs.
4 Prime Alternatives to Topsy
Looking for a Topsy replacement? All of these companies offer similar functionality with a few new perks.
- Agora Pulse – With features ranging from key metrics and Powerpoint reports all the way to a customizable Facebook Sweepstakes App, Agora Pulse is poised to become one of the top names in social analytics.
- Review Trackers – This service is more specialized than many of the Topsy alternatives, but it also offers comprehensive reports that businesses are certain to benefit from. Review Trackers does exactly what its name implies: tracks every review about your company that is posted online and gives you an analytics snapshot from your dashboard.
- Sprinklr – One of Topsy’s biggest competitors was Sprinklr, and with good reason: this service offers years of historical data and performance metrics that are compared across more than 130,000 social media related accounts.
- Netbase – Netbase has a client list that includes Target and VISA, and the system is able to sort through social data in 42 languages. Social analytics tracking for brand marketing, customer care and public relations are among Netbase’s list of global solutions.
Image: Topsy Twitter account
alex
It’s extremely disappointing. With topsy average internet user easily could have created reports and analyse for himself trends they were interested in. Very helpful in all kind of aspects of social media,both profesional and personal. All alternatives, you mention, don’t have the comfort and availability of the topsy. What a shame.
Jay Berwald
These site are not alternatives to Topsy as Topsy was a new source which provided free data without signing up. I could see what was trending, I could type three words and get data on their number of uses. It was an irreplaceable site that has no alternative
There are many more alternatives on a recently republished post “Twitter search alternatives & tools (now we don’t have Topsy)” on White.net.
It is a bit annoying that the domain goes straight with a 301 to an Apple support page which doesn’t mention anything about Topsy. ( https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201285) I would expect Apple to better than that.
Also BRAND24 would be a great alternative to Topsy. It’s really nice, efficient and affordable application for real time internet monitoring and analyzes. Worth to try!
Azam
I used Topsy as a social analytics tool in past and got so much success with this service. Now, searching for similar tools where plenty of new services available in the market. Can someone suggest me a good tool which i can use?