Twitter is a living breathing organism, which is getting bigger and bigger every day, and the bigger it is getting the harder it is becoming for a marketer to monitor the conversation that takes places on the platform. Tweets, retweets, and mentions get lost very easily in the torrents of tweets that are created every hour. Monitoring them can be a very time-consuming exercise, so it becomes necessary that a marketer uses some Twitter analytics tools to monitor his brand on twitter. To help you in that I am going to give you a list of 5 tools (plus one bonus) that will make your life easier.
TweetDeck
TweetDeck is the most effective and easy-to-use twitter management application. It helps you manage more than one twitter accounts. You can also track mentions, keywords, lists, and hashtags using this tool. TweetDeck is a full-feature free tool to monitor Twitter and other social networking websites. You can arrange your twitter accounts, use powerful inbuilt filters to monitor the twitter universe, and also schedule your tweets.
HootSuite
HootSuite is a web-based social media dashboard that allows you to perform many tasks. Like TweetDeck it helps you monitor many social media websites. You can think of HootSuite as an advanced version of TweetDeck. You can use this tool to not only monitor twitter and other social media websites, but also to launch an integrated campaign across various media channel. You can also build teams, collaborate with team members, and schedule updates from one central location. You can also geo-target your updates to stay in sync with your market’s time zone.
Backtweets
If you ever wanted to search for certain tweets, hashtags, or URLs which were sent on twitter anytime in the past than Backtweets is the tool you should look forward to. You can search for any tweet done from three-years-ago to date. The result is presented in a reverse chronological order. You can use this free tool to see who is talking about you and how you are faring on important hashtags.
Tweetreach
Tweetreach, as the name suggests, is a twitter analytics tool that helps you measure the reach of your individual tweet or your twitter campaign. You can use this tool to search, tweets, hashtags, keyword phrase, URL, tweet text, etc. Although you will need to pay to use advanced features of this tool, you can use the free version to keep an eye on the twitter pulse for your brand.
Tweetbeep
Tweetbeep is a Google Alert for twitter. Like Google Alert, it sends you an hourly update of tweets, mentions, hashtags, and URLs (even when it is shortened) that you want to track. The tool sends you an hourly alert for the activities you are tracking on twitter through emails. There is a premium version of service as well, but free version is good enough.
Bonus: Twitalyzer
Twitalyzer is one of the most powerful twitter analyzer tools. Although you need to pay to use this tool, you can use the 7-day free trial to test the tool and get a deeper understanding of your twitter reach. The tool uses demographic data, Klout Scores along with the data collected for your brand to give you a complete picture of your brand’s performance on twitter.
Conclusion
By using the tools I have discussed above you will save a lot of time which otherwise will be wasted monitoring twitter stream manually. All the tools I discussed above are useful, but for a starter you can begin with TweetDeck and Tweetbeep. These two tools will give you a fair enough idea about what such tools can do for you.