Oneupweb Reviews: TweetPsych, a Psychological Profiling Tool for Twitter

You may think 140 characters just isn’t enough room to reveal much about one’s psyche.

You’re wrong.

TweetPsych is Twitter tool that provides psychological profiles for anyone with at least 1,000 updates. That could make discovering like-minded people a little easier.

What Is TweetPsych?

Social and Viral Marketing Scientist (who knew there was such a thing?) Dan Zarrella created TweetPsych to compare the content of your tweets to a baseline reading of a random 1.5 million Twitter users by analyzing language. Users create a psychological profile by entering a Twitter username into the TweetPsych search bar. Results tell users how that person thinks unconsciously (primordial thoughts like those in dreams) and conceptually (logic and rational thought), as well as providing the cognitive and emotional properties of that person.

Just one profile can reveal whether someone is aggressive, anxious or focused on the past. If you’re looking for a forward thinker, does it matter to you if they’re aggressive or focused on past events and not the present?

Categories within these results vary, making comparisons difficult. For example, if we compare Ashton’s above psychological profile results with Scott Monty, head of social media for Ford Motor Company, there are a lot of additional categories.

Does the absence of a category imply something about a user? Is Scott Monty having more orderly thoughts than Ashton? Does this mean Scott Monty isn’t aggressive? Having set categories would make comparisons easier. Then again, it would also help if Zarrella explained the scoring system in his blog post about the new tool or on the TweetPsych website.

Is This Tool Useful For Your Business?

TweetPsych provides some great initial insight that can help you discover like-minded people, or, rather, discover whether you’re psychologically compatible with other Twitter users. That said, I wouldn’t lend this tool too much weight because it does only take Twitter into consideration.

While Twitter is growing rapidly, its user base may not accurately represent, say, your newest marketing employee, especially if that person is in his/her early 20s. This tool, after all, compares that employee to a random baseline that’s bound to represent a much older age of 35-49, the age range in which most unique visitors fall.

A recent Harvard study found that 10 percent of all Twitter users are responsible for 90 percent of tweets. What do we really know about that 10 percent? Are they the original tech-junkies who first discovered the benefits of Twitter, or are they soccer moms communicating with their friends and children? Or are they mostly Ashton Kutcher? We just don’t know.

So, while this tool has some benefits, it’s hard to claim it offers a fair comparison between your potential tweet followers or employees and the 1.5 million random Twitter accounts it compares them to. Also, the tool works best with a person’s individual account and not a company account.

Despite these setbacks, the tool itself works well enough. A note, though: you’ll know if someone doesn’t have 1,000 updates because the tool doesn’t return results. It just freezes.

Oneupweb Official Review: Oneup Thumbs-Sideways (There’s potential here.)