Twitter Metrics Programs

We’ve been looking at various Twitter metrics to really try and turn your twitter usage into something measurable, trackable, and improvable. The idea is to improve marketing ROI.

In this article, I’m going share some recommendations regarding the best analytical tools available for Twitter right now, as well as see what type of insight can be gathered from them.

Klout.net

Klout measures personal influence. In Klout’s own words: “Klout allows you to track the impact of your opinions, links and recommendations across your social graph. We collect data about the content you create, how people interact with that content and the size and composition of your network. From there, we analyze the data to find indicators of influence and then provide you with innovative tools to interact with and interpret the data.”

This is the best tool I’ve yet seen, supplying the most data and the best visualizations, as well as opportunities to import into Excel (albeit through a copy and paste) for my own data manipulations. They measure some 25 metrics.

TwitterFriends

TwitterFriends operates on the assumption that there are a lot of people we follow on Twitter that don’t create a ton of value for us, but that buried within those contacts are real gems. TwitterFriends helps you identify who those people are (the relevant net). These are people that you talk with frequently or that consistently feed you great content.

19 twitter metrics are tracked, most of which are completely useless, but a few which have value, namely:

Numbers of relevant/valuable contacts in your Twitter fanbase

Conversation Quotient (CQ)

• States how many tweets are @replies
• Shows the extent you are using Twitter to have conversations with others
• Good metric for tracking relationship management
• Average CQ is 25.4% (this can be used as a benchmark)

Link Quotient

• States how many tweets included links
• Good metric for tracking information management

TweetEffect

(attempts to measure how individual tweets affect follower counts)

This is an interesting idea and one with some potential if combined with other metrics. It assumes that what you tweet will affect followers within five minutes. The service analyzes your last 200 tweets and examines whether you gained or lost two or more followers within 5 minutes of the tweet.

Tweet Stats

(measures your Twitter activity)

This is an interesting program because it tracks activity for any user and presents it in an intuitive graphical format. It shows the following information:

• A month-by-month tweet log since you joined Twitter
• A daily breakdown of tweet volume
• An hourly breakdown of tweets by hour
• Hourly activity over a 7 day period
• @replies report
• Popular words in your tweets

What I don’t like here is the fact that I can’t get the data for myself. No data export, no CSV. I had to input this stuff manually.

Tweetmeme

(measures trends by link retweets)

Tweetmeme is a link aggregator service, collecting all the tweeted links in the Twitterverse and classifying them for searchability. It makes sense of a bunch of 140-character nonsense. Tweetmeme enables you to track your industry and competitors, as well as trends in general, and see what topics are of the most interest to people, as measured by the number of times they get retweeted. They also have some plugins and widgets which I find useful.

Twitalyzer

(attempts to measure the strength of your Twitter efforts)

This service was created by the guy who wrote Web Analytics: Demystified. He’s created a tool that measures 5 metrics:

Influence (how much do you impact the conversation)

• As measured by numbers of followers, number of times you are retweeted, number of times you retweet others, number of conversations you have with others, and number of tweets in general in a given period

Signal-to-Noise (the amount of valuable content you share)

• As measured by references to others you make (@conversations), imbedded URL links, hastags (#topic), and number of times you retweet someone else. These elements are summed and then divided by the number of total tweets in a period.

Generosity (the amount you retweet others)

Velocity (the frequency that you update on Twitter)

Clout (number of times you are cited in other people’s tweets)

The service is free and easy, but I don’t like how it aggregates information into pre-determined metrics. I have no ability to analyze the data or manipulate it for insights. Of any of the tools, I find this one to be the least useful.