A Look At 5 Free Twitter Measurement Tools

Twitter can be a great promotional tool for a musician, artist, band, engineer or songwriter, but it doesn't do you much good unless you can measure how well you're doing. Most social media analysts are paying less attention to followers and more to social interaction. Luckily there are a number of tools that allow you to determine just what your reach is. Here's an excerpt from Social Media Promotion For Musicians that looks at 5 free Twitter measurement tools.

"As with everything online, it’s possible to measure how well you’re doing on Twitter, although the measurement details can sometimes raise some eyebrows because of the differences between measurement tools. That’s why it’s best to look at the trends more than any actual scores that the following services provide. If you see a metric suddenly jump up or down, you want to know why. Likewise, if you see something trending up or down month over month, then it’s time for some real analysis. Here are a few measurement services to check out.

• Klout: Klout gives you a score based upon the total action from your Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Foursquare, Instagram and Linkedin accounts. You’re able to see the approximate number of mentions, retweets, followers and lists you receive, as well as a 90 day history.

• Topsy: Topsy is another measurement tool that has some free elements, but for anything granular it will cost you. It’s great for searching trends, hashtags, and just about any other social detail, and the Pro version can give you exact counts of mentions, sentiments, impact and trends.

• Trackur: Trackur is another tool that provides social influence and sentiment analysis for a price. It looks at all social platforms, not just Twitter.

• Kred: Kred is pretty cool in that it looks at your entire social community and scores you on your influence. It gives you a 30 day follower count, shows influence and outreach, and shows your top locations and communities, among other things. You can also look at the Kred scores of others globally, check out the scores for books, movies and TV shows, and see what your friends are scoring. It’s free for now.

• Tweetstats analyzes your tweets over time and is a good way to look at your personal stats in a nice graph.

None of these tools are perfect so it's best that you use a couple to get a feel for your current Twitter presence."

To read additional excerpts from Social Media Promotion For Musicians and other books, go to the excerpts section of bobbyowsinski.com.

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5 Analytic Metrics To Watch

Whether you're using StatCounter or Google Analytics or some other measurement tool, the different metrics that are measured can be daunting. If you want to know how your website or blog is doing at a glance, here are some measurements to zero in on.

Unique Visitors: This is the number of unique visitors to your site. It doesn't include people who have reloaded your page multiple times. I like to check this number for daily visitors, monthly visitors and against the previous month.

Visits or Pageloads: Don't be fooled, this is different from unique visitors. Some visitors will come back multiple times, while others will load different pages on your site, so this number will always be higher than Unique Visitors. Still, this does give an indication as to how useful your site is to your visitors in that a lot of page loads means your site is fairly sticky.

Source or Came From: This tells you how your visitors got to your site. It may have been through a link or through a search engine, but it's good to know, especially if one link is generating a lot of traffic.

Time On Site or Visit Length: This one is sort of a moving target because I'm not sure how accurate it is. Usually there will be a big number with a visit length of 5 seconds or less, and these can be attributed to people who found you from a search engine but determined that your page wasn't what they were looking for when they reached your site. The other numbers are much more telling though. If you have visitors that are staying on your site for 5 minutes or more that's a good thing, and if they're staying more than an hour, it tells you that you're offering a lot of great content.

Popular Pages: This is another metric that I like, especially if your site is fairly large with a lot of content, because it tells you exactly how many visits each page receives. This gives you an indication of how popular each piece of content is.

Once again, to really get a feel for how your blog or site is doing, compare it daily and monthly. This will tell you whether you're gaining more visitors or losing them. For more on this subject that's aimed more at Google Analytics, take a look at this article from searchengineland.com.

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You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.