As more and more people (to the tune of 2.5 million users a month) are using Twitter to develop social and business networks, more and more software geeks are getting in on the fun by developing analyzers and statistics tools, among other applications, to help show your status and to enhance your Twitter mojo. While some of these tools are just for fun, others are taken rather seriously by people who interpret the data to find new ways to build their following and influence.
Here’s the low down on a few of the more popular tools being used to analyze a person’s Twitter activity.
1. Tweet Later – Tweet Later lets you set up a tweet or a series of tweets and schedule them for broadcast later. While this flies in the face of the interactive nature of Twitter, many people find it convenient for times they want to announce something at times they will be unable to do so manually. Tweet Later will also let you automatically follow anyone who follows you and you can even automatically send a welcome message to your new followers.
2. Social Too – Social Too will also give you the option of automatically following people who follow you as well as send them a welcome. Social Too sends you an email each morning with a list of all the people who followed or un-followed you the previous day.
3. Tweet Beep is a service that sends you an alert whenever your chosen keywords are mentioned. You can use Tweet Beep to monitor when your name, your brand or your competition is mentioned. Tweet Beep can also keep an eye on how often your URL is mentioned, even if it’s used in a shortened URL.
4. URL Shortening Services – Because Twitter limits you to only 140 characters per tweet, posting a link to your website can be troublesome. There are several services, such as budurl.com or tinyurl.com that let you type in the URL of any site and will then shorten it into a clickable URL that uses fewer characters.
5. Tweet Stats is a hub for analysis of Twitter trends. Tweet Stats will show you a graph of your tweets per hour and per month. You can see which days you tweet the most in a Tweet timeline and you can also see your reply statistics.
6. Twitter Counter is a widget you can add to your profile, blog or Website. It provides the quantity of your followers by week, month and quarter. Twitter Counter will also predict the future number of your followers based on your average gains/losses.
7. Twitter Grader is a very popular stat tool on Twitter. Twitter Grader looks at the number of your followers, the power of your network, the frequency of your updates and the completeness of your profile and gives you a percentile score.
These are just a few of the services designed to help you use Twitter as productively as possible. While they can all provide you with useful information, its important to remember that they can all have incorrect data available to them as well. So ultimately, let the effectiveness of your Twitter time be determined by the interaction you have with others and the results you get with you business.