Giving a business or social media manager a list of free Twitter tools without directions is like going to The Home Depot to buy tools without a plan to use them. You will likely end up with a collection of power tools and a hodgepodge of projects in your home! Smart marketers need to ask the smart questions to help them manage their business against their goals. Once you have identified the smart questions to ask, then you can figure out what tools you need.
There are three key types of measures you for Twitter: Amplify, Engage and Convert. Today I am going to review the key questions about your reach and message amplification you need to be asking so you can connect with your audience and extended audience.
It’s important for you to ask the right questions to reach your business goals. The best free and paid Twitter tools will come and go. The questions will likely never change. Or, those questions will get more complex. Get the questions right, and you will have much more luck picking the right free Twitter tool and using it to its full potential.
10 Questions To Ask About Your Twitter Reach & The Free Twitter Tools To Help Answer Them
I have listed the top 10 questions that most businesses, large and small, should be asking to understand the reach of their Twitter messaging. As you can see, measuring reach is much more than counting how many followers you have. Take a look at these 10 questions and see if they apply to you.
1. What do I know about my Twitter followers?
FriendorFollow.com and Twilk.com create a picture-based mosaic of your followers, which can be used to insert into a deck or presentation. A great way to start any discussion!
Ads.Twitter.com provides the Male/Female breakdown of your followers, as well as their interests, to help you further target and engage with them.
Twtrland.com presents a Male/Female breakdown of your follower base.
2. Where are my Twitter followers from?
Ads.Twitter.com creates a basic heat map indicating the top countries and cities where your followers are based, so you know if your messaging is correctly geo-targeted.
3. What part of my follower reach is really not worth following?
FriendorFollow.com reports on your followers’ Twitter activity including the last day and the amount of tweets per day that each has engaged to make sure you are following active accounts.
Tweepdash.com lists followers that do not follow you back, like many other apps. Because someone does not follow you back, does not mean that you are not worth following!
Refollow.com sorts your followers by the last time they tweeted, indicating if your followers and people you are following are an active account.
4. Is my messaging reaching an audience beyond my followers?
TweetReach.com estimates the reach and impressions of your last 50 tweets, which factors in retweets that reach an extended audience beyond your followers.
Twtrland.com shows your retweets per hundred tweets, which lets you benchmark how many of your messages are reaching and incremental audience.
Ads.Twitter.com identifies which of your tweets, over the past 30 days, reached an audience that was greater than the average reach of your tweets. This measure helps you understand which tweets are reaching the most people so you can model other tweets to work harder for you.
5. When is the best time to tweet, so it reaches most of my followers?
Tweriod.com analyzes your followers’ last 200 tweets to give you time when they are most active. Therefore, you are more likely to catch them online with better scheduling.
TweetStats.com provides a tweet density graph to show when your tweets are hitting the largest amount of your followers.
6. Is my messaging reaching an influential and geo-targeted audience?
Twitonomy.com creates a map based on where your Twitter mentions originated so you can see where your ‘mentioners’ are based.
Twitonomy.com shows you Twitter lists and the members in those lists.
FriendorFollow.com ranks your followers and people you are following, by the amount of followers, to help you target the most count-based people.
7. How can I find people who should be following me?
Followerwonk.com finds and targets new people to follow by keyword if it is noted in their Twitter profile. It sorts this target group by influence rating, number of tweets and how many people they follow.
Tweeple.com allows you to search by any keyword in a follower’s Twitter profile.
Tweepz.com is a simple one-line search tool that lets you search for users based on information in their Twitter bio. The tool also filters the users by the amount of their followers.
8. Who are the most influential people on a subject?
Hashtagify.me notes the top 6 influencers, based on follower count, that have used a particular hashtag.
Tweetlevel.edelman.com furnishes the top 100 influencers who have recently used a particular hashtag, topic or link.
Topsy.com identifies influencers by the amount of times that Twitter user mentions a particular term, keyword or hashtag.
9. How healthy was my social network today?
TwitterCounter.com provides your daily count of followers and unfollowers. It also provides a graph of your follower growth over the last 3 months.
Ads.Twitter.com provides a daily follower and unfollower count.
UseQwitter.com provides you with a weekly unfollower count and listing these accounts.
10. Am I positioned as an expert so I can increase my message reach through retweets and Twitter listings?
Klout.com provides a rating to let you stack rank where you stand against your ‘competitors’ or relevant stakeholders.
FollowerWonk.com calculates a Social Authority score to rank your earned influence rating. It also lets you find others who are influential.
Topsy.com shows you how many times you have been mentioned in a tweet in the past hour, day, four days, seven days, thirty days and all time.
Am I missing question, or not noting a great free Twitter tool, that should be on this list? Believe me, I either use the tools mentioned or checked them out! If I missed something, please comment below or contact me at MarketingThink.com or @GerryMoran on Twitter.
While you are connecting the right tool with the right question, check out these Twitter resources to help fine-tune your home base:
How To Create The Perfect Twitter Profile
How To Build The Perfect Tweet
How To Retweet
Remember, the next time you buy a tool at The Home Depot, understand the job that you need to carry out. Your shopping trip will go quicker and be much more productive, with this planning. The same goes for your free Twitter tools … ask the smart questions first.