Whether you use Twitter for business or pleasure, there are a wealth of tools available to enhance your experience with Twitter. With Twitter recently gaining an entry in the dictionary and the number of users hitting 18 million, it's no surprise that firms are turning to Twitter to promote their business offering. If you are using Twitter for work purposes hopefully some of these tools will help you to report more effectively on the value of your profile. If you just use Twitter for your own personal branding it’s cool to see what kind of clout your tweets have (a gentle stroking of the ego).
Twitter Analytics tools are growing in numbers, with even Twitter developing some of their own. These tools will slice and dice up huge amounts of information and present them in neat graphs and statistics. These are the tools that I have found helpful in analysing my Twitter stream as well as others.
Twist – See Trends in Twitter
Twist allows you to see trends in keywords or product names based on what people are saying in their Twitter streams. Type in keywords that you would like to see trends for and Twist will produce a graph showing the frequency of your keywords over 24 hours, 7 days or 30 days. I wanted to see trends in days of the week and which days are mentioned the most. As you can see in the graph below the most popular days of the week are Friday and Sunday - can’t imagine why ;). If you want to make a keyword comparison, as I have, remember to put a comma between your keywords.
Why this tool is awesome:
- It allows you to spot trends in the collective Twitter stream which you can harness for your business.
- Unlike Twitter Search, you can’t see who is talking about you. The point here is to see the frequency of your brand mentions overlayed on the days of the week. I also compared the age old battle of Coke and Pepsi – looks like Coke is getting more mentions with both being talked about the most on Sunday. Hungover perhaps?
- Remember that this tool doesn’t convey sentiment so we can’t assume that Coke is more popular that Pepsi based purely on frequency. The important knowledge to gain from this tool is trends.
Twitt(url)y tracks popular URL’s on Twitter. It displays 100 of the most popular URL’s shared on Twitter over the last 24 hours. Similar to other Social Bookmarking sites such as Digg, where posts can be voted up or down, a posted link on Twitter counts as a vote for the link.
Why this tool is awesome:
- If you are into Twitter trends this is a cool tool to see what people are talking about and how far a link can spread.
- Twitt(url)y also calculates an estimated reach of the tweets.
- The top link today was “Official Google Blog: Introducing the Google Chrome OS” with 3524 active tweets containing the link.
Another handy tool, TweetEffect matches your timeline with your gain/loss of followers along a timeline. By analysing your last 200 tweets, TweetEffect highlights tweets that have resulted in you gaining or losing followers in five minutes post tweet. This is a fun tool to use, but it is important to note that your tweets are not the only factor in gaining or losing followers so it should not be taken too seriously.
Why this tool is awesome:
- It allows you to assume which tweets have lost or gained you followers.
- It allows you to determine which tweets are popular and how your tweeting behaviour affects your followers. I can bet that if you spam your followers with 5 tweets in 5 seconds you might lose a couple of followers. This tool will help to highlight that.
Twitalyzer measures your Influence based on the number of followers you have, your Clout based on the number of times you are referred to by someone else, you Signal-to-noise ratio based on your tweets containing hash tags, URL’s and references to other profiles using the @ sign, your Generosity measured by the number of times you retweet others and your Velocity based on the number of updates you publish over a seven day period.
Why this tool is awesome:
- It allows you to determine what aspect of your Twitter stream is lacking with each element guiding you towards good Twitter practice.
- I find the signal-to-noise ratio the most helpful as it points out if you are just throwing statements out into the Twittersphere or if you are providing your followers with useful, value added info. I like to think of a link as a reference. You can throw out the statement “Forget Social Media, SEO and PPC is where the money's at”, but it might not be taken as seriously or add any value without a link that backs up your statement: http://bit.ly/SjmWl
- Clout is quite a useful element - based on the number of times another Twitter profile refers to yours - it’s a nice measurement of your presence and how far it has spread.
What Twitter Grader is trying to measure is the power, reach and authority of your Twitter account. In other words, when you tweet, what kind of an impact does it have? This is calculated based on the number of followers you have, the power of your followers, how many updates you post, your follower/following ratio and engagement based on retweets. All these factors are applied to an algorithm that calculates your grade out of 100 and your ranking in the number of people who have previously graded themselves - when I used this tool that number was at 2, 645, 798. It is important to note here that this is not your grading with regards to all Twitter users, only those that have used Twitter Grader.
Why this tool is awesome:
- It takes all the elements that Twitalyzer considers and calculates one overall grade.
- This grade can be enlightening and useful when reporting on the success of a corporate profile in one single statistic.
- If you want to grade your personal profile it’s just interesting to see where you rank and what your grade is.
TweetStats analyses your Twitter stream and tells you (in the form of graphs) the density of your daily tweets, your aggregated hourly tweets, aggregated daily tweets, who retweets you, who you retweet and the interface used. It is really just a summary of your Tweeting habits.
Why this tool is awesome:
- If you manage multiple corporate profiles some of the graphs can be useful when reporting on the progress of the profiles.
- I like to use the graphs that show your average weekly, daily and monthly tweets. I also like the graphs that show who retweets you the most and who you retweet the most.
It’s helpful to note here that none of these tool require passwords, merely your username. This means that you can use them for competitor research, market research or just to see what popular profiles are doing right.
Click Stats:
I use a management tool, Hootsuite, that allows me to manage my five profiles from one location. It also calculates my click-through rates on any links that I post. This is a very important stat if one of your objectives is to drive traffic to your site. It also shows whether your followers find your posts interesting and value adding. I haven’t been able to find a free standing tool that calculates this for you, but I’m certain it’s out there. So if you know or use one, please let me know.
There are so many tools available so find the ones that suit your needs the best. I know I have only mentioned a handful, if you have any that you are loving right now let me know. Happy Tweeting!
Also See:
There is also Mr. Tweet which allows you to identify tweets specific to your industry and Tweepular which is an online twitter management tool for your followers.
Great post!
Posted by Sadie on 2009/07/16