With the growing number of active users (emphasis on the word active) on Twitter, it is imperative for marketers to focus on optimizing their twitter usage to be of advantage to their brand. But the problem is, it has always been hard for marketers to measure their brand's Twitter influence. And I believe what you can't measure, you can't improve. 

Of course it's easy to go to Twitter, create an account then start populating your feed and hope by some miracle you'll be found by your target market. If you're a very popular company or brand, I think it's going to be easy for you to generate your followers. But what if you're just a small brand with a very specific target market? How will you generate your list of followers? And since Twitter just launched their advertising program (and it's still on beta of course), assuming you don't have the budget for it, then how do you think you would generate that very specific list?

Okay I think I'm moving a bit far from my main topic which is analyzing your influence, so let me go back. I'll just create another post about how to build a tightly niche list of followers for your Twitter account. 

Luckily there are tools out there that can help you analyze your Twitter performance and I'm here to tell which one really works. 

For starters, the best way to measure your influence is to know who are the people you are currently influencing. Basic marketing tells us that in order to be competitive, you have to target the people that your product would be of great use. For obvious reasons - you wanna generate a sale and therefore increase your revenues. You can't simply target everyone, that is futile. 

So how do you translate this to twitter since twitter doesn't have it's own built in analytics? Simple, use Twitalyzer http://www.twitalyzer.com. Twitalyzer is a good tool that you can purchase for a small subscription fee and it gives you specific measures and metrics that you can use to further analyze your Twitter audience. It will give you an insight on who are following you, their demographics and in which twitter community you would most likely belong based on your published tweets. What I like about it is that it shows you your activities and it's corresponding impact trended over time.

Second step: now you know who are actively following you, next step would be to know the REACH of your tweets. Defining reach using marketing language would mean the number of people you would "hit" for every action/activity you create - in this case, your tweets. You have to know this because you want to know how significant your tweets are and you can estimate how big your account can be if you use Twitter correctly. I suggest you use http://tweetreach.com/

Step three: Post analysis! now this is a bit trickier since there's no proven way of really understanding what posts or tweets work best. The most scientific way of doing it is through statistics (yeah yeah fellow marketing communications specialists and experts, I know you hate numbers but we have to embrace it to further improve ourselves yah?! hehe). The only tool I can suggest for now in order to see which tweets gain and lose you followers would be TweetEffect http://www.tweeteffect.com. It's not as reliable as you think it is but at least you have a general idea of how your tweets are performing. My suggestion, export everything in excel and try to correlate your dependent and independent variables to get a numerical insight. 

So there you go. To summarize, use these three tools:

1. Twitalyzer 

2. TweetReach

3. TweetEffect

And export everything to excel and use statistics to further analyze!

Good luck!