You’ve got a Twitter account and you’re tweeting and retweeting like a maniac. How can you measure how well you’re doing? Well first of all, what’s your goal for using Twitter? Increase sales? Collect leads? Knowing your goal is the first step for figuring out what you need to measure. Once you have that, here are some basic measurements you may want to use to see how well you’re doing:
- Tweets – How many updates you’ve made.
- Average Updates/hour – On average, how many updates do you send out? (useful for measuring how close you are to the 80/20 rule)
- Followers – How many people are following you.
- Listed – How many times other people have listed you on a Twitter list. This can be a nice measure of influence since usually people only list people they feel are informative or interesting.
- Followers/Following Ratio – Very important measure used by a lot of people when they decide whether to follow you. While they probably don’t actually calculate the ratio, they may not follow you if you have a lot more people you’re following than who are following you. I tend to avoid people I feel are going for auto-follows and have more people they’re following than are following them.
- Retweets – Another good measure of influence. How often people retweet something you’ve tweeted because they want to pass it on (also gives your message a wider audience).
- Mentions – How many times your Twitter username is mentioned – either in a retweet, tweet or conversation. Good measure of engagement and influence.
- Clicks – Requires the use of a url shortener such as bit.ly or ow.ly. This is how many times people have clicked on links that you’ve sent out. Can be extremely useful for tying in Twitter with goals. For example, if you’re following the 80/20 rule (80% good information + 20% promotion), and occasionally send out a tweet linking to your blog or to a promotion, how many people click on that link?
There are more advanced statistics such as influence, sentiment, etc., but most of those require a bit of calculation or a specific tool. These basic Twitter statistics should provide you with a baseline measurement for how you’re doing and you can tailor your statistics to your specific goal.
What other basic Twitter statistics do you use?
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