One of the important aspects of a Social Media presence is your ability to measure its effectiveness in achieving your end goal.

Twitter is considered to be the current rock star of Social Media. Having such fame, it will inevitably end up as a potential spoke for your Social Media Hub. It therefore becomes important to be able to measure its effectiveness.

Defining Twitter Success

While most “experts” and “gurus” will say that the key to success in Twitter is having a large number of followers, I’m telling you that isn’t the case. The quality of your followers is much more important than the number of followers you actually have. Sending dynamic messages (with links to articles, photos, etc.) with good content will cause engaged followers to retweet your messages and engage you and your agency in conversation. There is more value in these types of Twitter activities than just sending non-dynamic propaganda.

This becomes evident when you begin looking at these three free analytic tools that will help you determine the effectiveness of your Agency on Twitter:

TweetStats

This is a very simple tool that measures the number of tweets your account sends out on a monthly basis, as well as the density of messages and their times sent over the course of a week. The tool also gives you insight into the top ten users you have retweeted and who have “@” messaged you. While the analytics aren’t deep, this is a great little tool to measure just how much your Agency uses Twitter, and to be able to quickly spot any gaping holes in your Twitter messaging approach.

Twitalyzer

This is a more advanced tool for analyzing your effectiveness on Twitter. Twitalyzer breaks your statistics down into 5 groups: Influence, Signal, Generosity, Velocity, and Clout. Twitalyzer breaks down your activity on Twitter, coupled with the activity of your followers, and is able to develop a better picture of your account than just counting the number of followers you have. Twitalyzer excels as a tool used over time. I would recommend analyzing your Twitter account once a week on a set day, and once a month of analytics has been recorded you can look at the changes in a time based analysis.

Twitter Analyzer

This is by far the prettiest user interface of the bunch. Twitter Analyzer provides you with a slew of statistics including your Popularity and Reach. However the real hidden jewel of the service is showing you the number of your followers who were recently online using Twitter. This is a hugely important statistic to know and understand, because the truth is the number of your overall followers are less important than the number of your engaged followers when you send out a Tweet.

About The Author

Dave Konig has authored 135 articles for PIOSocialMediaTraining.com

Dave has been involved in Social Media since 2005 through the current major services and some defunct ones as well. During this time he has been able to hone the craft by testing out the theories of others, creating his own philosophies, and gathering a better understanding of the mediums involved through networking and most importantly actual practice.

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