It’s no secret I love Twitter. I love it because it’s still completely open (unlike Facebook), and it gives you unprecedented access to millions of cool people.

My marketing strategy on Twitter is two-fold: it’s really important that I give some value through my twitter, so every day, I tweet useful tips and tricks about social media, and delicious recipes I’ve come across, as well. I also really try to engage with people as much as possible on Twitter. Engagement is incredibly important. If I go to someone’s Twitter feed, and every tweet is just them saying something about themselves, and they aren’t talking to anyone, I won’t follow them. The conversation is key on Twitter, and if you’re not doing it, you’re missing out.

When it comes to Twitter, there are a few stats that you want to track. Twitter, in terms of analytics, is much simpler than pretty much anything we’ve looked at so far.

Overall number of followers: is it growing? It doesn’t have to be growing by thousands every day, just one or two is enough if the growth is organic and steady. People will follow you if you add value to their stream. Experiment–for example, try tweeting 10 times a day and see if your follower count goes up or down. Try tweeting on a certain hashtag and see if your follower count goes up or down. The answer is in the numbers!

RTs: are you tweets getting some RTs? On Twitter, the RT is the highest form of compliment, and people RT things that they find valuable. If you are, again, getting a few a day, that’s a good sign.

@mentions: are people @mentioning you in an attempt to have a conversation? If so, that’s a good sign. I’m assuming you’re @mentioning them right back!

Here are a few tools to track your analytics on Twitter: 

Twitter’s Analytics: Relatively new, Twitter’s analytics not only give you an overall snapshot of how your tweets have done over the last month, they also break down every single tweet, and tell you how many impressions that tweet got, what kind of engagement (@replies, RTs, faves) it got, and what the engagement rate was. It’s nicely laid out, easy to read.

Twitonomy: Hands down, Twitonomy is one of my all-time fave Twitter analytics tools. It allows you to see how your tweets are doing in some pretty fine detail, but you can also check other people’s Twitter, as well, to see how your competition is doing. And how you can improve based on what they are doing. It very simply lays out for you how your tweets are doing, including which tweets get the most RTs, Follower growth, the works!

Tweetchup: Similar to Twitonomy, but not quite as good, Tweetchup also allows you to analyze your own tweets, or another users’. I like the reports that Tweetchup generates, though. They are nice and easy to read.

Hootsuite: I use Hootsuite on a daily basis–an they have a feature that automatically generates a weekly report. The only thing with Hootsuite is, because it’s a freemium software, your reports are somewhat limited unless you pay.

Next week: what you can learn from MailChimp’s analytics.