It’s Nice To Know Whose Looking At What You’re Looking At
It’s Nice To Know Whose Looking At What You’re Looking At
So you’ve got yourself set up with a Twitter account, people are following you back left, right and centre and you are engaging other Twitter users across the globe both about their projects and those that you are pursuing yourself. How do you work out whether anyone is actually interested in what you are putting into your Twitter stream? There is no straight forward way of getting metrics out of Twitter about how many people have visited your Twitter profile, or how many hits your profile is receiving. Your follower count, which keeps a record of how many people have opted in to listen to what you have to say, might give you part of the analytical data you are looking for.
The other way to go about generating metrics from Twitter is to look carefully at what kind of links you are posting through Twitter. We all know that Twitter only allows you to post links 140 characters long, to get round posting long hyperlinks to external content there has been a massive rise in the number of URL shorteners which allow you to put long links in and get small links out. URL shorteners work by giving users opportunities to use very short top level domains with short URLs, some are as short as http://is.gd, and they then generate random codes, linking the strings back to the original address that you supplied the service. If you use a URL shortener such as Bit.ly or Ow.ly you can actually get real time statistics about the number of people who have clicked through your links.
In addition to the number of people retweeting content I have posted on Twitter, it has been great to look at the number of clicks different links I have posted have received. Its important to remember that online influence grows not only from the ablity to supply readers with good content, such as your own blog posts, but also through knowing where to direct others, and pointing others towards quality content produced by others. Services such as Bit.ly allow you to know you are achieving success in this area.
Photo credit: M i x y on Flickr
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