Do services social monitoring tools like Mention.com, Socialmention.com, and Nitrogram rely soley on APIs or do they crawl or cache the meta data?

I would disagree with the premise that "big data" isn't being converted into valuable information. Modern advertising is being driven by exactly this ability. The problem lies not with the information, or lack thereof, but with the decision makers. Lack of vision at both the strategic and tactical levels of decision, fear of change, among other things are at the root of the problem.

That's the golden question! One solid way- involvement. Join local VA groups, check in with senior and community centers- sponsor events and actually workshops (everyone loves speaking, but most people love seeing company's doing things more than speaking). Getting involved looks good and makes you trustworthy beyond just good customer service. As far as data services are concerned, that's a valuable service! And a lot of individuals who own and run companies often time forget or misunderstand that- educate them. Give them the understanding of these services- without selling to them, and them come around to the crux of the issues with these service: hiring professionals to do it saves them time and money, but hiring professionals who love it does that and provides high quality!

There are so many ways to do it... Do you need this data for yourself, or you are planning to make a product around it? From what I see you can use Twitter API and Facebook Graph API (Are you comfortable programming?) Most of the students are active on social media so you will find lots of data. Facebook graph API will give you a number of likes and comments to all the posts of you competitors. You can analyze all the posts of your competitors. Using Twitter API you can get all the twits that use certain hashtags or mentions. If you are not into coding, but still want to get social media information, you can take a look at tools like IBM Watson ANalytics ($30 for personal use), it natively connects to Twitter API, and you don't have to be a programmer at all. It is intuitive and easy to learn. Analytics Canvas connects to Facebook Graph API (it's free for 30 days of trial). Unfortunately, you would not be able to collect any personal information from social media at large scale (age, income, gender, etc.), because it violates all the laws about privacy on the Internet. You can use census data instead. Google Sheets are a very handy tool if you are planning to use this information for personal research. You can set up a spreadsheet and add some Java script to make it collect all information from competitor's blogs, and also sites like Reddit. Finally, you can try web scraping (it's not the best, but can speed up the process). A tool like OutWitHub will collect information from websites (such as website reviews) based on the structure you provide (select html tags). You can collect thousands of reviews in one day if you automate it (paid version). Very easy to use. Note: not all the websites are open to this method, review their policies to make sure you are not violating their terms of service. Reviews belong to the website where they were published. If you REALLY need personal data (like how much they earn and how much they spend, etc.), just print out 100 questionnaires and go to Student Union Building of Dalhousie University. Most of the students will share any personal data in exchange for a Tim Horton's gift card that gets them a free coffee. It is probably the least technical and fastest way to get all the data you need. Hope this helps.

Are you talking about tweeting replies based on keywords in a tweet directed towards a specific @user? If so, then you should be able to find a developer to create a simple Twitter bot for you. You can get really fancy with it and even train an AI model to come up with replies on its own. Analyzing data is a much different beast than a Twitter bot. For one, Twitter data is unstructured data. Also, how do you want to analyze this data and how do you plan on using these results? That makes a big difference in the direction that the real answer to this question will take. There are a number of different tools available, but it's probably going to require a hybrid solution of custom programming on top of using the tools available.

In general, your database has value. Probably very little, but value, nonetheless. It would have considerably more value if you revived it and were able to prove that you had a viable business and active user base. While there are investors who buy dormant businesses, you'll find a much larger buyer pool if you have a turnkey business. All the best, -Shaun