Everyone seems to be on Twitter these days – well, everyone except me, so I feel a bit left out at times, but I don't really want to get into it because I tend to get obsessed with things quickly. However, there's an app made by a young Croatian developer that might be interesting both to Twitter novices like me and long-time users of the popular platform.
IT student Mario Nikolaus wanted to create an app that would collect and analyse Twitter data as part of his master thesis, but ended up taking the project way beyond his initial idea.
In an interview for Netokracija, Nikolaus explained how he came up with Croatia Tweet, an app that analyses tweets about Croatia and presents users with fascinating data, such as the most popular places in Croatia, positive tweets about the country, famous Twitter accounts mentioning Croatia etc.
"I'm not a person who likes to spin theories, I wanted to make something of use that I could also learn from along the way. I discovered Twitter offers Streaming API that would enable me to collect tweets in real time. Summer was approaching, I was thinking about the sea and I realised it might be good to check out what people are writing about out country", said Nikolaus.
A lot of analysis goes on behind the curtain, but the information available to users is presented in a simple, systematical manner. The only parameter you can currently set is the time period: choose start and end dates on a provided calendar and you'll be able to see what has been said about Croatia in the given time frame. For example, there's a list of most popular places, surprisingly headed by Plitvice Lakes instead of Dubrovnik that comes as a close second.
"Twitter isn't that popular in Croatia as it is abroad, so it's understandable a lot of users write about tourism. In a way, the app uses foreigners' tweets about out country to show how they see Croatia, what was their experience here or how they would like it to be. Of course, daily analyses will have you seeing a lot of tweets referring to recent events like our football rep being defeated by Iceland or our president's gaffe during her visit to the US. However, in a longer period, tourism will always pop up, and the most frequent words end up being beautiful, dream, coast, island, travel. In recent times, there's been a significant interest for real estate in Croatia coming from Russians", he stated.
It's obvious why the app is attractive to those working in the tourism sector, as they could always use more data and information about their users' behaviour on social media. Nikolaus plans to further develop the app and add more analyses that would rate the users' all-around impression of Croatia, as well as include a heatmap showing which countries people are tweeting from.
Good analytic tools are precious in sectors of tourism and marketing, and Croatia Tweet will surely expand a lot further once the right people realise its worth. In the meantime, it's pretty fun to check out and play around with time frames to see what people think of Croatia. See for yourself here!
