TOP 5 Twitter Analytics Tools
Once you start having fun on Twitter and building a real community there are several things you’ll want to analyze on a regular basis to track your success and develop a tweeting strategy. The following free tools will help you with that:
1. Map your followers
When you work on developing a strong Twitter follower base one of the essential informations you’ll need, is where most of your followers come from. Especially if your Twitter account is part of a site that tries to reach out to a local/national audience. Since a vast majority of all Tweeps speak English, language is not automatically always the best tool to distinguish yourself. Yahoo Pipes can show you an accurate map of two things:
- Where your followers come from (you’ll need to indicate your password for that)
- Where your friends (the people you follow) are located at
2. Track your links
Sharing interesting links with your Twitter follower base is one of the best ways to strengthen your community, interact with it and attract new followers. When you post links though you’ll want to know which kind of information is most interesting to your followers, so you can maybe share more links on that particular topic. If you use the URL-shortening-service Ow.ly inside HootSuite you can track how many clicks are generated on the links you post, from where they come and what your most popular messages were. You can even export the information as .csv file to create an Excel-spreadsheet:
3. Set up alerts for keywords
TweetBeep is a service similar to Google Alerts which lets you set up an alert when certain keywords (e.g. your site’s/company’s name, particular terms you wish to respond to and maybe generate sales on) are used. You’ll receive an email then and be able to follow conversations and leave comments on the reactions. HootSuite let’s you do this with an integrated column too but if you prefer emails alerts, this is the right tool for you.
4. Track your results
As soon as you create your Twitter account you should quickly visit TwitterCounter and enter your account’s username. The site will automatically track the development of your follower base and will display the stats in a graph that let’s you analyze easily during which periods you received more followers and during which you received less. Furthermore it’ll also display predictions of how much followers you are likely to have in about 30 days and let you compare your development to other accounts (Alexa style):
5. Find the hottest stories on Twitter
Guy Kawasaki once described the Tweetmeme button as one of the most powerful tools on the Internet right now. The Tweetmeme network facilitates sharing tweets, tracking how often a story has been retweeted and finding the articles/items that generate the strongest reaction at a given time. Integrating the buttons on your site…
… will not only help you track the success of your own articles. Following the network will also help you find topics which resonate the most within the Twitter community and might help you find subjects to write about yourself.
6. Break down your twitter activity
Tweetstats will help you analyze your own Twitter activity. It’ll show you how much you are tweeting exactly, at which time of the day and on which weekdays. When you know where most of your readers come from you should always try to schedule your Tweets at times where most people from your targeted audience can actually see and retweet them. Same goes for the days of the week you tweet on. The tool will also show you which resources you retweet from the most and whom you’re replying to the most.
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Girl Goes Tech (GGT) is about a 26-year-old, female tech-addict exploring her geeky side and writing about social media, mobile trends and applications.