A Little Birdie Told Me: Tools that Track Twitter Presence

Take a look at any company website, and you’ll be hard pressed to find one that doesn’t link to a Twitter account. More elusive, however, is finding a company that not only uses Twitter effectively, but also has a clear strategy in place to measure the results of its activity. In just a few short years, the value of Twitter has grown up to embody an incredibly useful tool for enhancing the company brand and driving engagement with more than 200 million active users. Yet, regardless of how many times a company tweets or retweets, the real measure of a successful campaign is how well the company is able to create a following and convert their followers into loyal customers.

Unlike traditional word-of-mouth advertising, Twitter conversations are easily trackable, and as a result, companies can analyze published content and the response of their followers. Unfortunately, most companies fail to tap into the valuable info they can glean from analyzing Twitter interactions.

The good news is that there are a number of widely available (and free) tools that measure the reach, relevance and resonance of Twitter campaigns. Some popular tools include:

• TweetLevel: Measuring 40 different elements, TweetLevel quantifies the relevance of a Twitter account based on its online activity.  It then provides four scores needed to understand the importance of the Twitter presence: Influence, Popularity, Engagement and Trust.
• TwitterGrader: This tool captures the influence of your Twitter account using elements such as number of followers, power of followers, frequency of updates, follower-to-following ratio and level of engagement in terms of retweets and responses.
• Klout: With more than 50 variables used to measure a standard for influence, Klout analyzes your Twitter account’s data to provide a score based on its capacity to influence behavior and outcomes. Klout also provides key insight into your own influence and identifies other influencers in the industry so you can learn with whom you can engage to improve your score.
• Kred: This tool analyzes Twitter activities for two measures: Influence (the ability to inspire action in the form of retweets, replies, likes and new follows) and Outreach (in terms of initiating conversations, interacting with others and spreading content). Users can also connect their Facebook accounts to Kred to gain more insight into their social strategy.

Once a baseline of a Twitter account scores is determined, companies can also identify where a given social media strategy can be improved.  Since producing a high number of tweets won’t necessarily raise the score, creating tweets that offer something valuable, such as a special promo or rich content like video or images, may entice Twitter users to continue following and engaging with your company. As a result, users will be more inclined to share, like and promote your tweets, which in turn will elevate the company’s brand and enhance its social media presence.

This post originally appeared on the blog of our sister site, Devon Interactive.