“Because Twitter is so clearly lacking in analytics to help their users understand how well they are tweeting, there are many companies in this game.” Well, in terms of “understanding how well you are tweeting”, to my knowledge there’s really only one tool that specifically is designed to do that – Twitalyzer. The other tools are mostly broader in scope – they don’t deal specifically with Twitter.

I haven’t looked at any of the others recently. Twitalyzer is indeed “metric rich”, but they’ve got a pretty good user guide at

http://www.twitalyzer.com/definitions/Twitalyzer-Handbook.pdf

That used to be more prominently featured on their web site than it is now. But the key metric is impact – it’s an overall assessment of how well you’re doing. It’s the magical “one number” for those who must have one number.

Right now it’s saying my impact score is 7.3 percent. That might sound low, but below that it say that value is in the 92.8th percentile. What that means is that only 7.2 percent of the Twitter users in their sample have more impact than I do. The overarching goal would be to increase that value.

My goal for the past year has mostly been building a follower base. Twitalyzer helps me characterize my followers and decide which new followers I should follow back. Although there’s a lot of debate about this, *both* quantity and quality of followers are important. It *is* a numbers game – the more followers you have, the more conversations and retweets you will get, all other things being equal.

Twitter is a complex multi-dimensional network. In addition to the constantly-changing social graph, there are patterns in physical space and time. The last time I looked this morning, on a relatively slow Saturday morning Pacific Daylight Time, Twitter was collecting about 500 – 700 tweets per second. It’s much higher at certain times – I think the record during the World Cup was about 4,000 when the final match ended.

“I have a hard time knowing where in Twitalyzer to go to look at my new followers and decide who to follow back. Do you know where?”

I mostly look at the score – just paste the Twitter name in the box from the email and let Twitalyzer run. I obviously can’t do that with all my current followers – that would be possible with a screen-scraping script but it’s not worth the effort. Essentially I just unfollow existing followers if they get annoying.

“Overall, I don’t think enough of my friends have signed into Twitalyzer to give me significant analysis of my network.”

If you go into Twitalyzer and look at the control panel, you can actually see your “active” network. Generally, if you run into someone Twitalyzer hasn’t analyzed it a while, it will give you the option to update their score.

“So it’s interesting to me that having one number is important to you, and it sounds like “impact” is it.”

Actually, I’m far from a “one-number” person myself – I’m a mathematician and model builder. I like models and equations – ways to make predictions.

“What do you think about seeing the components of “impact” instead of a score, for example, the percentage or number of people who retweet you, mention you, and follow you.”

Twitalyzer can do this – in the earlier versions it was one of the default reports but they’ve added a lot of functionality since then. You can still do that if you want. Just go to the “Recommendations” page.

“We’re working on a way to do this and also show this on a tweet-by-tweet level, so you know which one of your tweets performed the best and then you can learn from there what makes a tweet that resonates with your followers. What do you think about that?”

It seems easy enough to do in theory, but I’m not sure how it would work in practice. I’ve been on Twitter a long time – I joined in early 2007, But I only really became active towards the end of 2008 and am primarily a Portland-area Twitter “persona” rather than someone attempting to build a “national” presence.

What’s the name of your tool?