Affinitive’s Social Media Playground

With hundreds of tweets hitting popular users (retailers, celebrities, etc) daily how does the savvy marketer keep up or track on tweets and the elusive Twitter mentions?

In our experience, many of the Twitter trackers currently on the market do not have the capacity to accurately monitor the exact number, nature and content of Twitter user name mentions on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.  Luckily, we marketers now have a few options for Twitter back-up to help us track and archive our tweets.

Some of our favorites are listed below:

1. TweetDumpr as the name suggest dumps your Twitter time line into a CSV file.  For those users with large public timelines (it cannot dump from private/protected accounts) the site will send you an email once your file is ready for download.  We also like Twitterscribe for this type of functionality as well. The main drawback of these services is that they don’t have a way to archive for anything other than your tweets—sometimes you want to find old direct messages and those elusive mentions.
2. TweetBackUp has a great and easy to use API.  Its basic (free) service doesn’t offer much more than a daily dump of the last 3,200 or so tweets; however, unlike some other services mentioned here, TweetBackUp automates this process.  TweetBackUp also allows you to review your data in a variety of forms including RSS and HTML formats.  Where TweetBackUp really shines is in its premium service offerings which allow for a CSV file dump in addition to the other formats offered with the basic service and it allows you to access more than one Twitter account, search hashtags and archives twitpic photos.  The premium service is a good value at only $12/year.
3. TweetSaver pulls in all your latest tweets (up to the last 3,200) and allows you organize, tag and search the information easily.  TweetSaver also is one of the few services that also pulls your mentions in addition to direct messages and favorites.  The main drawback of this service is that it costs money to join.  However, you can join for as low as $10 a year with their graduated pricing plans.
4. TweetTake is a FREE service that allows you to archive any of the Twitter features you’d have access to on your account such as tweets, followers, friends, direct messages and the like.  You can either aggregate these things in one search or search within a particular category.   You can download the information in an Excel compatible format.
5. Lifestream Backup is a Twitter archiving service but is much more than that.  Lifestream Backup connects to your Twitter account as well as other social accounts like Flickr, and WordPress (and in Beta Facebook, Gmail And YouTube).  This service doesn’t track mentions unfortunately, but it does allow you to access more than one Twitter account and compare it to your activity on other social networks.  The priciest of the offerings mentioned here its $30/year for up to 20GB of storage, and hosted on Amazon’s S3.

What have you found? What’s your favorite service for this functionality?