Aptus Consultants

If you work in marketing or public relations, the chances are you are now regularly being asked to use social media to spread your client’s messages. I have met lots of marketers and business owners who are surprisingly still trying to figure out how to get the most out of these channels with many trying something small but not measuring the results effectively.

In light of that fact, I thought it would be good to share some useful Twitter tools with you – so you can measure that and see how you are doing.

The truth is Twitter is all about conversation, not just marketing offers, although that said they do help to a certain point. To my clients I always recommend no more than 10% marketing messages on any of your social channels, the rest should be useful, fun and engaging otherwise people will simply unfollow you or your client.

So if you want to measure how successful your communications campaign has been online what do you do? I always recommend using a decent analytics package as a starting point there are loads available but the one I use for this blog is Google Analytics because it is free. I mean what’s the point of creating more web traffic if you don’t know where it came from or why?

There are hundreds of twitter tools that measure different statistics out there but many can be a bit of a waste of time. I have been through most of them in the last few years and given them some kind of test, so I thought I would share my top 10 with you – so you can use them to measure how effective your Twitter campaigns are.

1. TweetStats –  This is another great Twitter app (which just turned two years old from Damon Cortesi) basically it graphs your Twitter stats including Tweets per hour, per month and Tweet timeline. It’s not the most beautiful of sites but the functionality is great – cap tip to Damon!
2. TwitterGrader – this is a well put together tool which looks at your profile and gives it a ranking – it also has an api which could be useful for developers.
3. Twitterholic – this tool looks at all of the local twitter users in your area and gives you a ranking.
4. TweetVolume enter a few words and see how many times they appear on twitter. 
5. Tweetmeme is a service which aggregates all the popular links on Twitter to determine which links are popular.
6. TweetValue – this shows you how much your twitter profile is worth in $
7. TwitGraph this sites looks at your profile and then measures your tweets and provides you with data in a colourful pie chart format.
8. TwitterMeter This was a great service which is now on hold hence its ranking.
9. TwitterPoster this tool creates a kind of picture/mosaic that represents your users with the most followers with bigger icons.
10. Twitterank this works like a Google page rank but on Twitter but it seems to have broken on the day of writing. However, it gets a rank because it was supposed to be a good tool.

If you have a good tool to recommend, please feel free to share it. For instance, I know Hootsuite and Bit.ly are also great stats tools to measure your link popularity but if you have more please just add a comment and let me know.

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