PrintThough the Ashton Kutcher-CNN race to 1 million followers brought a lot of hype to Twitter, your follower number isn’t the only metric you should be looking at to determine how successful you are on the popular social networking site. Check out the following analytics tools that can help you get a better picture of your Twitter activity, from how many people are retweeting your messages to how you stack up against other users.
This super simple site asks one question: How annoying will it be to follow you on Twitter? Though annoyingness might not be a typical site metric, it does come into play on a social site where people choose to follow or “unfollow” you at will. Once you enter your name, you’ll find out your average tweets per day, what percentage of your tweets are @replies, and what percentage of your tweets are exactly 140 characters.
Though the site bills itself as a personal networking assistant, Mr. Tweet gives you a valuable snapshot of how you’re perceived on Twitter. After signing up, you’ll get statistics for how much you tweet (in comparison to Twitter’s founders), how engaging you are, and how frequently you tweet links. You’ll also see your friend-to-follower ratio and what that says about your networking style, as well as a list of followers you’re not following back and recommended connections in your extended network.
This one-metric measuring site tells you where you fall in the spectrum of retweets: the number of people who have passed along your message. The application just gives you a ranking, though it doesn’t analyze who is retweeting you or what messages are being retweeted.
For the serious stat fan, this robust Twitter analytics tool will tell you about everything from your tweet, reply, and retweet volumes to your most common keywords and most loyal friends. It’s a great tool for learning about your Twitter habits, seeing who your closest Twitter friends are, and learning more about the groups your followers fall into. If there’s a metric you want to see, this application probably provides it, with dozens of graphs and lists detailing your every Twitter move.
Working on growing your follower list? Check out TwitterCounter to track your number of followers over time, see your average growth rate, and get projections on how many people will be following you in the future. You can also get your Twitter rank (how close you are to having the most followers) and compare your growth rate to others on the graph.
If you like to see how you compare to others, check out Twitter Score. You put in your Twitter name and get a popularity score on a 1-to-10 scale. Another site that evaluates your popularity is Twitter Grader.
