What kind of footprint have you made in the Twitterverse? Do you know your Twitter ROI, your Twitter influence or stats that determine your Twitter psychographics? In the social media world, this data is becoming easier and easier to access as new analytical tools become available... and now you can track it.

Becoming more and more significant, social networking analytics will be used by companies to determine what type of consumer you are, and by prospective employees to consider you for hire. As a modernized version of the Kevin Bacon paradigm, social media has reduced our 'connectivity to others' from 6 to 3 degrees.

Most Twitter users are seeking exposure. Whether that reach is to sell a product or oneself, it's up to the user. How they perform on Twitter to meet that goal will determine brand advocacy. The ones that work to perfect relationships and loyalty will thrive, while those that fall short of this goal tend to lose interest and drop off. One needs to know the value of the Twitter resource and the investment of time that is required to become a successful member of the Twitterverse.  

Similar to our every day lives, if one focuses on creating value, building transparency and becoming  authentic, the greater chance one has in making an impact on Twitter. I relate these personality traits to our newly elected president Barack Obama. He embodies these characteristics and could be the reason he was elected to highest office in the land  (also see previous blog that discusses Obama's use of social networking)

So social networking analytics are the tools to both qualify and quantify our worth. Here, I have selected what I feel are the top five analytical tools that are available to us today. They will help us determine various aspects of our Twitter make-ups. Not totally perfected and some are still in beta format, I suggest you explore these tools to best analyze your brand and the value and reach of your tweets.


1) TwitterAnalyzer

TwitterAnalyzer is one of the most comprehensive Twitter analyzer tools out there. It tracks followers who are online when you are, number of readers that have been exposed to your message, your tweet habits, who is retweeting your updates, twitter follow statistics, growth rates, conversations being made about you, the size of your audience and your followers' demographics. It will let you research the way your fellow tweeps behave. It will surface which messages they answer and which ones they paid attention to, drilling down to their occupations and which users and are in your line of work.

2) TwInfluence

TwInfluence is a  tool for measuring the combined influence of your Twitter account and followers, and then assessing your reach through the quality of your followers. Since all users and all followers are not created equal, this analysis will determine the “horizon of communication” that extends beyond your own direct contacts. This is demonstrated whenever somebody “retweets” your message and its influence begins to create ripple effect throughout the Twitterverse. TwInfluence uncovers one's reach, velocity and social capital, and its worth the time to spend with this tool to learn how these components interact.


3) TweetStats

TweetStats will graph your total tweets by the month, by the day, and by the hour. It also tells you your number of @replies and which interface you used to Twitter your tweets. By calculating the volume of your tweets and retweets it quantifies your tweet density. Most people who say they get no value from Twitter should first look at their usage and consistency to realistically evaluate what they have invested in Twitter before they consider the results. This tool also allows you to spy on others or those that have amassed Twitterati fame, as long as you know their Twitter handle.


4) Twitter Grader

Twitter Grader is another third party app which calculates a grade for a particular twitter on a scale of 0-100. It will show you your ranking in your city, state, and country. It will also show you active and influential Twitter users that you may want to follow. The Tweet Cloud indicates the frequent user words in your Tweets with the most commonly used in larger print. This is very beneficial because its a quick overview of your content.In addition to the TwitterGrader, Hubspot also has a Facebook Grader, Website Grader and Press Release Grader that you should check out as well, if those stats are important to you.


5) TweetPsych

Still in Beta, TweetPsych is a work in progress. Its purpose is to build a psychological profile of a person based on the content of their Tweets. It compares the content of a user’s Tweets to a baseline reading that was built by analyzing an ever-expanding group of over 1.5 million random Tweets, and then highlighting areas where the user stands out. Dan Zarella,the developer behind TweetsPsych continues to expand his set of psychological definitions, while also refining the system and its algorithm to better analyze Twitter-specific content.

Dan feels TweetPsych has great potential in matching like-minded users to identifying users that exhibit certain useful or desirable traits. He is asking users to provide him with feedback to improve the system and the technology and take TweetPsych to the next level. Check it out and report back to Dan.

Since all of these tools are free, I suggest taking them all out for a test drive to determine which ones work the best for you. In helping you qualify and quantify your Twitter efforts you can better define your goals. Sometimes, we get so caught up in what we are getting out of something that we often forget to look at we are putting into it. Are you worth following, do you create value for your Twitter followers? Are you an observer or an active participant that is part of a collaborative community? All these questions and more can be better assessed with the assistance of some or all of these tools.

If you honestly look at what you are investing in Twitter and continue to apply an analytical eye, you will slowly begin to benefit from the output and the fruits of your labor.


[inventorspot]

8 million users can't be wrong. If only it made some money.




What's the big deal with Twitter? The online instant update service has become a media sensation and a supposed target for the likes of Google and Facebook. But is it an over-hyped flash in the pan or a real business opportunity? The answer could be a bit of each.

Twitter lets people or organizations send messages to "followers" - fans, clients, employees or anyone who signs up. The updates, thoughts or reactions arrive instantly via cell phone or computer updates. They're limited to 140 characters each, so pithiness is vital. (All but one of the sentences in this article qualify.)

Twitter's 8 million users run the gamut from lovelorn teenagers to celebrities like Britney Spears to the New York Times. The last of these has more than 500,000 followers receiving its story links and news updates. Some members of the U.S. Congress use Twitter to fill in their constituents. A few have even been spotted tapping away on their mobile phones in the middle of President Barack Obama's speeches.

The celebrity presence has drawn millions of users and driven media attention, but it can seem pretty inane. British actor Stephen Fry has 382,000 followers tracking updates of his peculiar daily minutiae. One example: "Me in a sarong. The freedom and ease ... Mmmm could get to like x".

But scratch the surface, and Twitter does have potentially significant features. For a start, it's a burgeoning social networking site. That means its membership (or followership) is both growing and sticky. It benefits from a network effect - as more of people's friends and colleagues sign up, their own incentive to join increases. Then it's just a question of finding a way to make money from the traffic.

That may have eluded Twitter itself so far, but it could be what makes it interesting for potential acquirers. One key concept is real-time search, potentially a real technological advance. Google (GOOG, Fortune 500), Yahoo (YHOO, Fortune 500) and Microsoft (MSFT, Fortune 500) search engines work, generally speaking, with old material. A search of Twitter could be made to yield almost real-time information on news, events and users' opinions.

A search could track reactions to a just-released G20 communiqué, or employees' instant responses to a company announcement. Twitter could also theoretically be used to analyze trends - almost to create real-time opinion polls.

Twitter also has one other thing few companies except Google have achieved so quickly. It has become a verb. Twittering - the sending of "tweets" - has become second nature to its users. There's already a "twitiquette" for using the service, and some people are trying their hand at "twiterature," also known as "twitlit."

That could all help explain why Google might consider paying more than $250 million for Twitter, as technology blog Techcrunch suggested last week. A few months ago, news reports also suggested Facebook was interested. Either company could conceivably harness Twitter for profit by selling custom advertising based on a user's current activities or location, for instance.

For now, though, Twitter is nothing but potential from a business perspective. The Web site's unique visitors for February were up nearly fifteen-fold from a year earlier. But the service has only just started trying to bring in revenues, let alone earn money. Meanwhile, its investors have sunk $57 million into the company, including a $35 million injection which valued it at $250 million just two months ago.

So Twitter seems poised right on the line between Silicon Valley pipe-dream and the Next Big Thing. Its fame isn't yet accompanied by any level of financial success. And its big weakness is that, in theory, another group of Stanford engineers could easily make a competing - or better - service. But its story thus far does eerily echo that of another Silicon Valley hotshot: Google. And that may be the most important reason why Twitter's hype, while excessive, is worth ... well, following.

[cnnmoney]

We have been talking a great deal lately about how Twitter should be monetizing their service. Most of this talk comes after news that Twitter secured $20 million in venture capital, to push its total valuation to $250 million. It wasn’t long ago that Twitter started looking for a product manager to define a revenue stream. This is a smart move for a company that has relied solely on venture capital from day one.

Andy recently wrote a post detailing his thoughts for a Twitter subscription program. This is an idea that even Twitter’s CEO Evan Williams has spoken about in the past.

We’ve though about it. We had to do some thinking about that to raise a bunch of money, but it’s not actively in development right now. The broad strokes on the matter are obviously Twitter is being used for a lot of commercial purposes right now, in addition to social purposes. We think that works pretty well. We think there’s a lot of companies that we’ve talked to that seem to be getting a lot of value out of it. If that continues, if that becomes a rich world for users and the companies, we think we can extract some revenue from that.

While I think that a subscription based program of some kind would be a good idea (one I would probably subscribe to), I think that implementing that alone would miss Twitter’s full potential completely.

Twitter’s Full Potential

As Seth Godin states, Twitter is a protocol. What’s a protocol? A protocol is a set of “rules determining the format and transmission of data.” The Twitter Protocol is made possible through Twitter’s overwhelmingly open API. Because of it we can integrate Twitter into just about anything.

So, Twitter is a protocol, whats the big deal? Protocols control the flow of information. Those that have become masters at information control have built insurmountable wealth as a result.

Here’s two real world examples at how the Twitter Protocol could bring on lots of wealth.

URL Control: Many Twitter users use some type of URL shortening service to make their URLs more manageable with in 140 characters. At the moment Twitter is integrated with the infamous TinyURL. If Twitter brought URL shortening in house they could not only brand out going URLs, but they could also control them. Think about every link that leaves Twitter to places like Amazon.com or eBay.com, now think about those links all of the sudden turning into affiliate links. Or how about all of the links that point towards Google SERPs, now think what it would mean if they changed into links that integrated the AdSense for Search program. Are you seeing were I am going with this?

Twitter as a payment gateway: Back in June of last year, Nate Westheimer proposed the idea of Twitter becoming the next big payment processor, by monopolizing on the mobile communications industry’s need for a mobile payment processor like PayPal. I still think this is a solid idea and I am shocked that not many have talked much more about this. Westheimer tells us that combining Twitter’s carrier free social messaging service with a payment processor could put the company in a position to define the mobile standard for payment processing.

The true power behind popular protocols can almost never be predicted, mostly because they are defined by how they are used. This means that as Twitter grows it will have to remain observant of emerging trends of its users, so that they can wield their protocol in ways that allow them to prosper with the aide of their users. For myself, I am excited to see the future.

[marketingpilgrim]