It’s not news that consumer’s attention spans have been getting shorter and shorter over the last few years. But it’s been getting so bad, a study at UMass Amhearst found, that viewers of YouTube videos abandon watching if buffering takes longer than 2 seconds!

In this “up-to-the-second” world, it can be argued that the only content that’s important to consumers and brands is the one that’s being shared RIGHT NOW. 30-minute-old news is just that: old news.

So what about historical data then? Does it really matter what people were saying about the iPhone 18 months ago? Should anyone still care?

To answer this question, we’re turning to sports. In the vast majority of competitive sports (from chess to basketball), all a player or team are focused on is what’s happening that at that specific moment, and what’s going to happen really soon. Nobody pays attention to the past while the game is being played.

The best players and teams, however, play even better because they also study history. They study the strategies and gameplays of the masters before them. They study their next opponent’s strategy from past games.

One of the best ways someone can perform their best while the game is played is by having studied and incorporated historical data.

There’s a valuable lesson for social media marketers here: Before you start running a campaign, it’s a useful idea to get a sense of what’s happened before in social throughout your market. This is just one of the things you must take into account, sure, but it’s an important one.

That’s why today we’re releasing access to 2 years of Twitter historical data in the uberVU Dashboard. 

How access to historical data works:

Historical data is provided on-request only. It is available for any stream. All you need to do is go to the specific stream, click the “Historical” option under Settings, and select some options, such as the time frame. An account manager will then get in touch with you to provide you with estimates (time, cost, etc.). Once you’re happy with the estimates, you will then have access to the data within a few hours.

The data will be available under the same stream, and it’s easy to explore by using the calendar filter. And you can insert this data into reports the same way you do with real-time data.

Here at uberVU, we’ve been one of the first supporters of real-time social data. We still believe that this is where the power is, this is where the future lies. It’s where the game is played. What you post right now, who you reply to right now, what campaign you’re running right now, these are the only things you have control over. But to make the most of what you’re doing this moment, learning a few lessons from social media history can go a long way.

Tagged as: historical, historical Twitter data, Real-time data, social media, social media campaigns, social media engagement, social media history, social media marketing, twitter