Maintaining a Twitter account can be challenge enough if you’re using the profile for networking or work-related purposes. If you need some help seeing if your tweets are doing their job, try one of these free Twitter analytics services.
Twitonomy
Twitonomy is the jack of all trades when it comes to free Twitter analytics. Starting with the first page of the service, Twitonomy makes it a breeze to track conversations around Twitter. Fully customizable modules updated in real-time help you monitor the Twittersphere’s conversations based on keywords, users, or lists that you’ve identified.
The app also comes with a free analytics tool that breaks down a Twitter account (any account – it doesn’t have to be yours) into digestible statistics and graphs that make sense of how you’ve been using Twitter. This part of the app condenses your account into powerful data sets including the rates of mentions or retweets, most used hashtags, and graphs of tweet frequencies, among other stats. As a bonus, Twitonomy’s “Mentions Map” visualizes where people have mentioned your tweets throughout the world – you can get a good sense of your global influence.
Twentyfeet
Twentyfeet’s free service mines through your day-by-day performance, and presents its analysis in easy to decipher graphs. On its own, Twentyfeet isn’t the most comprehensive service on this list since it really just takes some basic information like the number of retweets, mentions, followers, and plots this data on a graph. But where it comes in handy is its tracking of rather important metrics that other apps haven’t covered, like the number of followers that you’ve lost, and even an analysis of users that are and aren’t following you back. If you’re looking for a more robust service, you can opt to pony up for the paid package, which includes more custom date ranges, and being able to export your data. We’d just recommend you to save your money and use the free version to complement Twitonomy, though.
Twitter Counter
This one is arguably the most recognized free Twitter analytics platform on the market. The app isn’t as comprehensive as Twitonomy since all it really does is monitor your follower count on a daily basis, but for the follower number-obsessed that’s OK. Twitter Counter approaches analytics in a way that’s easy to digest, a selling point if you’re not really looking for a service that lists a dozen different metrics that you wouldn’t know what to do with. And to Twitter Counter’s credit, there are two useful features to get a better sense of how your account is performing. You can compare your account with up to two others, and if you check out the right side of your Twitter Counter profile page, the service guesses the number of users you’ll gain based on how this number has grown over the past seven days.
TwitSprout
TwitSprout, like Twitter Counter, is concerned with how many followers you’ve gained or lost in the past week. The data that it collects is by all means basic and just a snapshot of your performance in the last seven days. For a free service, you can’t really complain about what TwitSprout lacks, but the one feature that’s worth signing up for is the “Hourly Change in Followers” and “Daily Tweets.” With these two graphs you can get a better sense of what time during the day and on what days you should be tweeting to garner the most engagement with your followers.
Twtrland
Then there’s Twtrland. This analytics service is very visual so it skimps out on the numbers and data points. Instead of telling you how many tweets are being engaged with or how quickly you’re amassing followers, Twtrland takes a completely different approach from the competitors that I’ve mentioned above. It lists the tweets and people you’ve interacted with that performed well or matter to you so you can go back and revisit the types of content that resonated with your followers. For instance Twtrland breaks down your tweets into groups, like mentions, people you’ve held conversations with over Twitter, and your most “Famous Words.” So if numbers are meaningless to you, Twtrland is the way to go. The one gripe that we have with Twtrland is that the service requires you to manually refresh your account so that Twtrland’s engine can spit out the most up-to-date analytics.
Ready for an upgrade?
Whlie we’ve identified five free Twitter analytics services for the average user, you might be feeling professional enough to merit paying for a subscription fee. It that’s the case you’re ready to upgrade to more robust and thorough analytics platforms that brands will use like Crowdbooster and Twitanalyzer for instance. But until you get to that point, we’d recommend any one of the above five services (or a combination of them).
