Monitoring your message on Twitter

[Gruden]

Following on from my previous blog post relating to viral marketing and web 2.0, I began researching the various tools which provide useful analytics for viral marketing campaigns. Your message might be out there, but who’s receiving it? Who’s passing it on? Who’s remixing the message? Who’s lost interest in what you have to say altogether?

Re-tweeted from @TrendTracker was an interesting blog post relating to 27 key tools which enable users to find and manage followers on Twitter. These tools enable Tweeters to effectively report on their Twitter statistics, and provide a mechanism for connecting with like-minded Tweeters with similar interests.

While some analytics tools listed were inactive,*a few*of the more useful tools listed include:

• TwitterFriends: TwitterFriends helps you to find the users that are meaningful for you and keep in touch with them. Those could be users you are talking to on a regular basis or who are feeding you great links all the time.
• Twellow: This tool helps to “cut through the clutter” to find other Twitter users in a specific industry using this service.

The preferred Analytics tool of the Grudenites at this point in time is Twitter Analyzer, which seems to provide the most comprehensive statistics on our Twitter account out there at the moment.

An alternative way to track mentions of your brand within Twitter is to use http://search.twitter.com to create an RSS feed of search results for your brand, then hook it up with your feed reader of choice (iGoogle, Outlook 2007, etc).

These tools provide the “value-add” to your social marketing campaigns. Too often, the “set-and-forget” approach is utilised in the online space, frustrating consumers and users who are genuinely interested in interacting with your brand. Utilising social networking analytics tools can provide detailed and accurate statistical reporting on viral campaigns, brand accounts, and brand messages; in turn, facilitating highly focused, targeted and successful campaigns.

Analysing your messages this way puts you well ahead of the game. Many marketers are still under the impression that social marketing is a new-age buzz word and doesn’t deserve the same level of attention as conventional advertising, public relations and marketing campaigns. The Social Media Tsunami by JD Gershbein highlights the very reason that this is a dangerous attitude for marketers to have. Ready or not, social media is changing lives and redirecting popular notions about people, places, products, services and all aspects of lifestyle in between.



More...