March 9th, 2010

Where Are the Basic Twitter Tools?

Deep down I’m a numbers guy.

When Fight does something in the world (either for ourselves or for our clients), I want to know what happened, and, to me, that means numbers.

What I can’t get my head around (through no shortage of banging my head on it) is why there aren’t any basic numbers around stuff we do on Twitter.

I’m not looking for anything particularly complicated, and maybe that’s the problem.  I just want Impressions and Reach.  But I’ll be darned if I can find them anywhere.

Impressions – Impressions is the number of time that your message was seen by a person. It doesn’t matter if it’s the same person seeing it over and over, or if it’s one unique person for each time the message is viewed. For this reason (among others), I’m actually not a big fan of this metric, but it’s simple, and it has equivalents across all kinds of media.

On Twitter that would be (for any given tweet), the number of people who follow you directly, plus the number of people who follow lists that you are on, plus the number of people who follow anyone who retweets (either in the traditional or new fangled way) your tweet, plus the number of people who follow lists that your retweeters are on.

This will give you an idea of how many people could have seen your message (not all of them did, of course, and others will see your tweet without following anyone (like, through search, or the like)).

Reach – This is the total number of individuals that saw your message. It removes any times where a person saw your message more than once. In the Twitter world, you would keep track of every unique individual you run into when counting impressions.

Reach is especially handy when applied to Twitter as a person who follows you directly might also follow, for example, a list that someone who retweeted your message was on.

More than abstract measures of “Klout” or the like, these numbers tell you what actually happened when you tweeted something, which is the gateway to understanding which things that you tweet are resonating with your audience, and which are not.

But the trouble is, I can’t find them anywhere – at least not calculated like I would. And beyond these are yet more interesting metrics that could be generated, but aren’t (again, as far as I can find) and a whole awesome concept of Twitter-based CRM that I’ve yet to stumble on (though, admittedly, I haven’t looked recently).

Am I just digging in the wrong place here? Do tools exist that measure this and I’m just missing them (@twitalyzer? @webtrends? Speak up if I’m missing it)?

Can anyone help a numbers guy out here?

Rob (@RobAtFight)
  • You're right, of course, that Twitter CRM should really just be an extension of your regular CRM. What's interesting is that now you can actually track in your CRM who saw your message, how many times, when they became a direct follower of yours (vs a follower of an RTer, for example), when they left, what they RTed, etc.

    So much info that we've only begun to scratch the surface on.

    As for the hacks, I may take you up on it if I can't find anything that already exists ;)
  • The two CRM tools that I know interface with Twitter are Salesforce.com and SugarCRM. I've actually got SugarCRM running on my workstation - the base platform is open source and you can download a working stack for Windows, Mac or Linux without paying a dime.

    The other tool I use a lot is ViralHeat. It's a low-cost social media monitoring platform. It's not open source, but they have a nice API for downloading raw data, which saves me the trouble of coding Facebook and other non-Twitter interfaces. And, of course, Clicky for web analytics and Twitalyzer for Twitter analytics - PDX home-grown tools. ;-)
  • I've seen things like this, but I'm probably the wrong person to ask - I build my own tools from scratch using the Twitter API.

    Twitter CRM - well, I think the general trend is to get an "ordinary" CRM, like Salesforce.com or SugarCRM, and use a Twitter plugin to accomplish tasks in your workflow over Twitter. That makes a hell of a lot of sense to me - why build a Twitter CRM when you've already got your email, web, etc. integrated with your CRM.

    But I'd be happy to build you some quick hacks to get stuff into Excel, Access and Word. ;-)
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