Just Tweeting for Online Business May Not Be Enough – Measure Your Twitter Power

Twitter can be an online business’ best friend, sending traffic and helping to get those precious backlinks as followers spread what you’ve tweeted. Kudos to you if you’re using Twitter to connect with new people, grow your network and send traffic to your blog. One way you know you’re getting traffic from Twitter is to check your web analytics such as Google Analytics or Woopra (and damn, you better at least have web analytics, my friend). You can see how much traffic you’re getting from Twitter, but otherwise you don’t get much information, leaving a data gap between what you’re doing and the results you’re getting.

Twitter Analytics & Power Features

Twitter analytics of some kind lets you see and measure the following:

• Which links you tweeted got the most clicks
• Who your most engaged and active followers are
• Who you’re following who may be “dead weight”
• Retweet effectiveness

Many of the companies that provide Twitter analytics also provide a host of “power services” so business can use Twitter most effectively:

• Tweet from multiple accounts and/or multiple users
• Post-date tweets
• Repeat tweets at timed intervals
• Automatically retweet specific feeds, hashtags or other twitter users
• Suggest people to follow or unfollow
• Cross-post to other social networks like Facebook or LinkedIn

Pluggio

Pluggio is a great starter service if you’ve never done this sort of thing before. Pluggio lets you create a free account which has some limitations but it’s definitely enough to get you started so you can try it out. Here’s a brief video on how to set up link tracking in Pluggio using the popular Bit.ly URL shortener/tracker service (if you can’t see the video in your email or reader, please visit Remarkablogger to watch it there).

HootSuite

HootSuite offers a much more robust (but more complex) feature set. This is the “big guns” of Twitter analytics and power services, capable of servicing large as well as small business. Here’s a video overview of HootSuite:

PostRank

PostRank has slightly different spin on measuring Twitter effectiveness. They take several factors and use them to calculate engagement events & points. A higher number of engagement events or points means your tweet reached more people and saw more action.

Another important difference is that PostRank is for measuring your website’s social media effectiveness. It’s not a twitter client like Pluggio or HootSuite. What PostRank does best is show you how effective your blog content is in the social media sphere. You can use PostRank in addition to either Pluggio or HootSuite. Here’s a video overview of PostRank:

What are You Using?

Are you using any of these tools? How do you like them? Any others we should know about? Tell us in the comments!