Twitter is becoming increasingly important as a tool to use to promote your business or personal brand. But how can you tell if your Twitter-based social media program is effective? Wouldn’t you like to know how many people your tweets are reaching, whether people are clicking on links in your tweets and how influential your Twitter audience is? URL shortening services and some smart web applications that use Twitter’s open API make it easy. Here are three simple (and free) tools that I like to use:
How far do your tweets reach?
“TweetReach” will calculate how many people have seen something you’ve shared on Twitter. Let’s say you’ve recently tweeted a URL linking to your blog post or event; search for that URL to see how many people saw it. The reach is the total number of different people who would have seen tweets on your topic in their Twitter stream. TweetReach takes into account people who follow the same people, i.e. it doesn’t count users twice. Using TweetReach you will quickly see the power of retweets in reaching a larger audience.
How influential is your Twitter audience?
Twitter can be a powerful tool in the right hands and there are lots of tools that can help you to understand the power of your audience. For example, Klout tracks the impact of a twitter user’s opinions, links and recommendations across a social graph. It takes both the size of the audience and the influence of an individual’s tweets into consideration. Why would you want to know this? First, you’ll want to know how influential individuals in your twitter audience are, and second, you’ll want to understand the effectiveness of your own Twitter persona.
Are people clicking on URLs in your tweets?
The last tool I like to use is the Bit.ly URL shortener service. Bit.ly creates unique user-level and aggregate links that allow you to view real-time traffic and referrer data, including location. Determining these statistics is easy: just add a “+” sign to the end of any bit.ly link (for example, http://bit.ly/7EGnQZ+) or get an account on bit.ly and tweet directly from their site.
Keep in mind that leveraging Twitter to promote your business takes a lot of time and patience. Don’t get too carried away with the reports from these sites but rather use the tools to get a feel for what the data is telling you and how it relates to your business.
About the authour:
Chris Schmitt (@chrisjschmitt) is the founder of TeamCamp and the fearless leader of Twegather, a service that leverages Twitter to organize and promote your meet ups.
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