Track news trends through social media

The International Journalists Network posted an article today by Amy Webb on how to use social media to stay updated on breaking news throughout the day as well as follow major news trends.
For Twitter, Webb suggests:

• Searching tweets through keywords related to news topics using Monitter.
  
• Using TweetMeme to see the most popular links on Twitter and Twitturly to find the most-shared URLs. During breaking news, links to breaking news articles become more prevalent on both sites.
  
• Looking at Hashtags.org for a list of all the different hashtags on Twitter, many of which are based on keywords or phrases that can be related to news subjects.

Webb also recommends employing Google Trends to search for multiple keywords, allowing you to see how many people are Googling a particular subject. Using the site to view the most popular Google search trends by country can also be helpful, she says.
We have also found Google Alerts, a free service by Google that allows you to get email digests of Google results on specific keywords, handy for keeping up on specific topics and developing news.
Wikirage, another site Web suggests, claims you can "Monitor the Hive Mind through Wikipedia Edits." The site lists which Wikipedia entries have received the most edits sorted by hour, day and month. When breaking news occurs, an entry about the event will often become the most edited.
A Web site good for finding news trends on television is SnapStream, according to Webb. The site graphs keywords said on U.S. television and highlights which topics are growing or declining in popularity.

To find out more about these online tools, view the full article here.

IMAGE CREDIT: TWITTER.COM,GOOGLE.COM/TRENDS,WIKIRAGE.COM