thanks to the social media networks like twitter, we can get an instant snapshot of what republican candidates are generating and which ones are generating the biggest buzz as we head into the iowa caucuses. our ali velshi is here. he's analyzing the trends for us. it's pretty impressive. bhar we see wk ali? >> you and are are big tweeters. we get why this really works. what we've got is great new technology i want to share with our viewers. we can see in realtime where tweets are coming from either because the person tweeting has a device that locates them or they have their location in the twitter profile. the number of people who tweet indicates where they are tweeting from he wants somewhere upward of about 12% of all tweets. so this is realtime. in the last 15 minutes, we're going this on 15-minute increments, these are tweets from around the country which mention any of the candidates. you'll see many of them are in purple. purple is the color that rick santorum is representing here. you'll see ron paul in this pink