Analyze This! On Twitter

Twitter has become one of my favourite tools for keeping in touch with the people, subjects and events that I care about. As is typical with anything that becomes phenomenally successful, there are those that will blast it and denounce it as wasteful time mongers and vanity tools, but to those that have given it the time and effort, it has become invaluable. And to truly appreciate how well you are using this powerful tool, there are some equally impressive analytical tools to make it easier.

The first application can be found at twitter.grader.com, a product from Hubspot.com. This easy to use twitter analytics tool simply asks for the user name and you hit 'enter'. What you get is a report on your rank (I was 477,851 out of 2,853,905) and your grade out of 100 (I'm at 83....my buddy @seedgirl is at 97.3). Following things like number of follows, power of followers, updates, recency and a number of other factors, Twitter Grader has created an algorithm to help you easily determine your effectiveness on Twitter.

Twitter Analyzer is another tool that I stumbled upon. It has cool dashboard like features that help you track how you are using Twitter. I consider this tool to be a surface level analysis in that it tells you things that you could probably gather on your own, but it's impressive to see in graphs.

Now for influence, an application called TwInfluence was created to measure the combined influence of twitterers and their followers. When you enter your address, it gives you your ranking based all others that have submitted their names. At 145,296, it's a small sampling so far. It's primary measurement of success is based on the number of followers your own followers have. If I have 10 followers each with 5000 followers, I'm deemed to be more influential than if I had 5000 followers with only 10 each.

Twitter Score uses a different algorithm to assess popularity and influence, but comes up with similar metrics as TwInfluence. It too looks at who follows you and who their followers are. They also analyze a few other things like updates and retweets and in the end assign a single score out of 10. I guess I have some work to do because I'm sitting at 3.9:-(

Now for me, I think the power of social networks is how remarkable you are. In other words, how do your followers take what you offer. Do they retweet, do they click on the URL, do they respond? So a good measurement for me is delivered by Twitterank. Right from their page, 'Twitterank calculates a score for each Twitter user indicating how engaged, interesting and/or prominent they are. As the name implies, Twitterank is sort of like Page Rank for twitter users, and uses "back references" of sorts to calculate a user's score'.

There are a few other analytic tools including Twitalyzer, Tweeple Rank, Klout, and TwitRank. Each one has their own merits and each one gives you a benchmark and a means to helping you measure your performance on Twitter.