Twing.com, a vertical search engine dedicated to online communities and forums, has launched two new features designed to help brands in gain more insight into discussions about their products or services online.
“Corporations don’t control the messaging nearly as much as they used to,” said Scott Germaise, director of product management for Twing.com. From a brand monitoring and management perspective, it’s important for companies to be aware of what’s going on in the community space where people are talking about their products or services, he continued.
One of Twing’s new features, Saved Search, enables users to save previous searches so they can continue to follow online conversations, Germaise explained. The second new feature, Buzz Graphs, allows users to graph the popularity of certain terms within online communities and forums, he added.
The benefit is that companies can see what’s going on with their competition as well as their own products in the discussion space, Germaise said.
In future, Twing wants to be able to take saved searches and allow users to set alerts when content is added that can be delivered to e-mail addresses or news feeds, Germaise said.
People use search engines like Google and Yahoo to search the Web, news, blogs and images, but these engines don’t necessarily search forums and communities, Germaise noted. “A lot of people have really missed out on the community space in general,” Germaise said. “They’re monitoring blogs and perhaps starting to monitor things like Twitter, but they really haven’t looked at forums.”
