Measure What’s Working on Twitter with These Ten Free Tools
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“What doesn’t get measured doesn’t get managed” is a maxim which is quoted regularly along with variations such as “What gets measured gets done.” In the context of digital marketing, we use this maxim to underline the importance of regular tracking, measuring and reporting of our activities. This helps keep our efforts focused and guides our decision-making processes when it comes to improving results. By tracking and measuring we can more readily see what is working (or not) for us.
In today’s post, I want to share with you some tools — all of which are free — which will help you dig deeper into the analytics behind your Twitter activities.
1. Buffer
Buffer is my day-to-day scheduling tool. The free plan allows you to easily track the performance of your tweets. Thanks to its “Top Tweet” feature, you can identify top performing topics with ease. For richer insights you will need to upgrade to a paid plan.
Here’s an example of a recent tweet I scheduled which performed quite well. With Buffer I can easily “re-buffer” or re-share it again.
2. Foller.me
A simple, yet effective tool to get insights about any public Twitter profile. One of its best features is the “word cloud,” which shows you the most popular words from a specific account.
3. Followerwonk
You can use Followerwonk to compare your social graph to competitors, friends, or industry leaders. This tool is free for one profile only. For unlimited searches, report downloads, and the ability to track changes in your social graph, you will need to upgrade to a paid version.
I like the ability to get a snapshot of individuals on Twitter. I’m using my own account as an example here, but you can see how this would be a good way to identify influencers.
You can track where your followers are located in the world.
Find out the best times to reach them on Twitter and what’s really cool here is the ability to integrate scheduling optimization with Buffer.
See what words your followers tweet about. You can see this would be most useful when you are trying to identify what your followers are interested in.
You can use Followerwonk to determine the age of an account as a way to measure value. Users who have been on Twitter for a while are early adopters, and generally more valuable than newbies. As well, there is a higher percentage of spam accounts in newer user segments (as Twitter has not yet cleared them out). I joined Twitter eight years ago, so I guess I am one of those early adopters.
As you can see there is a ton of things you can do with this tool and it provides you with some nice graphics if you need to present a progress report to your boss or client.
4. Keyhole
Simply type in the hashtag or account you’d like to track and KeyHole will show you an in-depth report of that particular search. Here’s a snapshot of my top tweets by engagement.
5. Klout
Klout allows you to see your top-performing tweets over the past 90 days and assigns a Klout influence score. You can track this score as a measure of your progress.
6. SocialRank
SocialRank lets you know exactly who your followers are. It organizes all your followers based on different criteria — like location, the number of followers they have, keywords, activities, and how engaged they are with you on Twitter.
7. Tweetreach
Enter a user name, hashtag or keyword for instant analysis. Use it to track the reach of your tweets ( the total number of estimated unique Twitter users that tweets about the search term were delivered to), your most retweeted tweets, and top contributors.
8. Tweriod
Use Tweriod to find out when your followers are online and get your optimal times to tweet and reach them.
9. Twitter Analytics
Twitter’s native analytics tool is a treasure trove of insights. Here you can find valuable insights about your audience that you can use to improve your strategy. It helps you understand exactly WHO your followers are; their demographics, interests, location, lifestyle, and even buying preferences.
10. Twitonomy
A freemium tool which yields insights on your followers, influence and interests. Here’s a snapshot of my analytics — and yes, I do tweet a lot!
You can also get search analytics on any hashtag, user or keyword. With the pro version you can download tweets, mentions, RTs, favorites and reports to Excel & PDF documents — a useful reporting tool.
These are just some of the many tools out there that you can use to track, monitor and measure your progress on Twitter. Create a simple “dashboard” to track the data on your internal website or on a shared Excel document and report back on the results each month with your team, or client. Use the data to adjust your strategy as you go.
Above all, whichever tool you choose, make sure you know just what you are measuring — and more importantly just why you are measuring it.
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