Convincing the boss that Twitter matters is still a serious thing, especially at larger firms in the B2B space where risk aversion is high, legal issues are legion and metrics are king. Putting effort into a Twitter account just because everyone else is doing it won’t fly.
Thanks to Twitter’s open API, there is a veritable plethora of tools out there now. Here is a sampling, which should go a long way toward putting some hard numbers behind your efforts:
- BackTweets Want to know what the community’s reaction is to your press release? Use this tool to look up the release’s URL and get real-time conversations related to it. Sometimes I just plug in our site’s main URL to monitor the brand.
- Tweeps.info – This site empowers any twitterer to know who tweets about what, how often they tweet and whether or not they use hashtags, share URLs and more. Practically speaking, this means you can track your competitors pretty well. When the site is up, that is. Which is not as often as one would like. But what do you want, for free?
- Twitteranalyzer – Self-described as “The Most Advanced Twitter Analytic System In The World,” this one is more for analyzing yourself rather than the competition. Charts and graphs abound, including: Reach, Subject Matter, Follower Growth, Follower Density Map, Follower Activity.
- TwitterFriends – This tool has been down for some time now. All that is there now is an ominous banner reading “Big things are happening behind the curtains,” whatever that means. I hope it comes back soon as it was a great tracking tool for learning about one’s followers. Great for working out who important followers are, or who is feeding you useful links.