Handy Twitter Tools

I have been using Twitter since the sixth of January 2008, at first it was a slow process as I was drifting though uncharted waters, but since then I have really gotten in it. I have met many great “similar minded” individuals and use Twitter to complement my Face-to-Face networking. In early September it was announced that Twitter would be adding analytics. Until now there have been third party tools that can be used to get a little more information on your Twitter habits, some of these tools can also be used to analyse some of your followers. I shall run through some of the tools I have found useful.

I shall start with Twitter Grader, by going to the following link Twitter Grader, you are requested to enter your Twitter name, you can put in yours or even one of your followers. This give you some basic information on your rank, number of Followers, number following and number of updates. It then gives an account summary, including a very useful follower graph. Next, is a Tweet cloud giving a cloud of most used words. The second last section gives you tips and suggestion in relation to ways you can improves you tweeting, however I have put in my name a few of my followers and I have found it says “Congratulations! We could not find any areas of concern with this twitter account. Tweet on!”, so if you find it gives you some tips, let me know until then I shall questions its usefulness. The final section, allows you enter another account name to see if this person is reciprocating the follow. This allows you to only check one name at a time, later I shall introduce FriendorFollow.com to check all your followers to see if they are following back.

Next up is TweetStats.com, this is great for those of you into graphs. This contains lovely colourful graphs for your tweet timeline, your tweet density (based on your local time), Aggregate daily tweets, aggregate hourly tweets, replies to, interface used, who you retweeted. All of these categorise are uite useful to understand you own habits, but more usefully if you have the time and patience you can used to understand the habits of you followers.

Another similar one to TweetStats.com is twitter-friends.com, I shall not go into this one in detail as there is a lot detail here, just bare in mind that there are tabs across the top of the page. But at this stage you should know the drill, put your twitter name into the field and discover you own habits, then put in some of you followers and this will reveal information on them that you may not be aware of. There is a video on the site main page, please watch as this is very insightful.

Finially, I shall run you through FriendorFollow.com, as I have mentioned already, this enables you to generate a list of followers to see if they are following back. I find this useful when I am pruning or tidying up my twitter network. Through this site,I have discovered that there are some Tweepeople will follow you, you then might follow them back, and then in a week or so they will unfollow you just to build up a high number of followers. This tool will then enable you to identify them, and at this stage you can decide whether you want to unfollow them also.

Just to note some of the above tools will probably not work on those who have protected their updates on twitter, and to be honest these people are in the minortiy so lets not get caught up in this.

Another handy tool, which is Short.ie, this is not necessarily a twitter tool, if you use it to shorten you links, and sign up for the account it give you information on the number of clicks. This will give you some idea o the interactivity of the links you post on Twitter (or even you blog).

This is a non-exhaustive list of Twitter tools, so if you know more, specially those which have been useful to you please share with me in the comments section.

Moral of the Story, “Understand yourself before you can understand others, and use tools to enble your understanding”