Top Resources and Tools to Measure & Analyze Your Twitter Followers

It took the Internet marketing industry more than 10 years to elevate the SEO discussion from "Where do I rank on search engines?" to "How much business do search engines send my way?" It's only taken only about 10 months to elevate the Twitter discussion from "How many followers can I get on Twitter" to "What is the value of using Twitter for my business?" Maybe, as an industry, marketers are finally learning something.
"New" Internet marketing should aim to take the sexy out of marketing.
Not that marketers should begin wearing an outdated wardrobe and black socks.
Rather, they should take a very analytical and business-oriented approach to getting real, measurable results.
Less flash and bang, less smoke and mirrors, less shock and awe...
and more results.
When it comes to Twitter, there is no shortage of services offering to get you 10,000 followers in a week.
But it's not about volume; it's about influence, demographics, reach and targeted conversations.
I'd much rather reach 100 really great followers in my target market.
Or 10 followers who influence my target market.
Or one follower if it's Oprah or Barack Obama.
But how do you know if you've got a good follower.
What are the characteristics of a "great" follower? If a productive, business-focused Twitter account is judged on more than merely its volume of followers, then shouldn't there be more to determining what makes a good follower than how many people THEY are following? In fact, there are some elite followers that might not have a large body of followers themselves.
So how can you tell the good from the bad (and the ugly)? Here are some of my favorite tools for measuring the value of your Twitter followers: Twinfluence - Twinfluence not only gives you the number of followers for any Twitter handle, it shows how many followers those followers have.
It also measures the velocity of a Twitter handle's growth, that is, how many new followers or second order followers does it gain daily.
The site also measures social capital (how important a handle's followers are) and how centralized the handle's reach is (does it have a broad or limited reach).
The tool is a great way to compare your Twitter presence to competitors, based on metrics other than just sheer number.
Twittorati - As the name implies, Twittorati comes from the same fine folks who bring us Technorati.
If you're looking for the elite of the elite on Twitter, this is the place to go.
The site tracks the Twitter activity of the top 100 bloggers on the Internet, as determined by Technorati.
The site also tracks what links are being Tweeted by the top influencers and the top Twitter hashtags.
How can you use Twittorati? First, you can keep an eye on those top hashtags.
If you Tweet about healthcare reform you are doing yourself a huge disservice if you aren't using the #hcr hashtag -- but you wouldn't know that if you aren't tracking the top tags.
Also, as Twittorati expands to cover more of Twitter's most influential members, you can work on getting connected with that "super influencer" -- by first figuring out just who that person is.
MyTweetCloud - By searching a Twitter handle on this site, you can identify what terms that user tends to use most often and get great insight into the things your clients, customers and followers tend to use.
This is a great way to see if your prospects are talking about you, your competition, your products or a vacation at the beach.
Tweetstats - What a cool way to graph your Tweets.
Just drop the Twitter name into the box and you can quickly see trends in your Tweeting...
what days you Tweet, what times you Tweet, who you Retweet.
Oh wait, you know all that stuff.
The good data starts when you drop in the handles of your followers, competition, partners, vendors and clients, and you can get an idea of their Twitter activity.
TwitterSheep - Interested in who is following you and your competition? This is a great tool.
The site generates a tag cloud based on the profiles of your followers.
If you are trying to reach CEOs of mid-sized companies, but your tag cloud has terms like "vegetables" and "fitness," you may be reaching the wrong folks.
If you sell to the healthy living crowd, those may be exactly the tags you want to see.
(My tag cloud tells me that my typical follower is a social media coach named Kevin who likes jazz and wears a small locket).
Foller.
me - Looking to find out more about any one of your followers? This site will not only build a cloud on the terms a follower most frequently uses, it will tell you what hashtags that person has used, who they've mentioned and what part of the country her followers come from.
If you're looking to identify someone who is highly influential and reaches women in the northeastern US and tweets about topics related to breast cancer, this one tool can help you quickly test to see if a person fits the bill.