IF marketing & advertising

Twitter offers numerous methods of measuring the popularity and effectiveness of their accounts. Both Twitter and independent websites offer programs and tools allow users to gather and analyze a variety of data, including metrics for individual posts or topics, account growth, traffic and more. 

The variety of data available is important. Simply tracking your number of Followers does not provide conclusive information about your audience, and it does not indicate the overall success or failure of your messaging. 

We use a number of tools to gather metrics about our Twitter account. Here are a few useful applications: 

According to “How to Gather and Use Twitter Metrics” on wikiHow, the tools below perform the following functions: 

• The Follower count indicates the number of people you are following and the people who are following you. You can calculate the number of “retweets” – the number of posts that Followers shared with their Followers, and you can create custom links to measure the traffic of specific URLs. 
• Twitterholic measures the growth of an account over time. It also compares Twitter accounts based on region, revealing the most popular accounts for a certain geographical area. 
• Google Analytics, used for many other websites, also provides a tool for Twitter. This measures the traffic of the account, including the number of visitors per month and visits per follower. 
• Twitalyzer is an independent website that measures a Twitter account in five ways: influence, signal-to-noise ratio, generosity, velocity and clout. 

Not only can businesses use these tools to measure data about their own account, but the public can use these tools to check the credibility of accounts they follow. Giving the public access to these measurements helps make Twitter a more effective communications tool. It allows the community to identify influential and significant users, detect spammers, and determine the actual popularity of accounts, including their own. 

All of these tools will help Twitter gain credibility among businesses, as they can attain a variety of measurable data to measure the success of their accounts. 

These instruments also support the notion that Twitter is a valuable social network, and might be more of a permanent marketing staple than many experts initially believed.