How To Track Twitter Stats, Clicks, And Trending Topics

Written by Benjamin / August 27, 2009

Twitter’s popularity has exploded this year and it welcomed 50 million unique visitors in July 2009 alone. With all the fuss about Twitter, we thought you might be interested in some ways to track your Twitter statistics. We’ll examine both free and paid ways to look at your account stats, show some options for tracking Twitter trends, and also look at several different ways to track your Twitter traffic.

Track Individual Twitter Accounts

First we’ll look at ways to track individual accounts. You can look up statistics for your own account, but that’s not the only way you can use these services. You can also use them to track your competition or people you’d like to emulate to see how they use Twitter.

Twitter Analyzer

Twitter Analyzer provides a nifty interactive chart that analyzes your tweets over the last month. The chart shows the number of tweets for each day and when you click on a data point, the Tweets panel to the right of the chart will display your tweets for that day. Below the chart, it will also give you the retweet statistics for the day and how many users may have been exposed to your tweet.

There are also other charts available by clicking the icons at the bottom of the screen which will give you information on the number of your @replies for the previous month, the number of times your username was mentioned, your daily readership exposure, a breakdown of your tweet subject matter, a breakdown of hashtags, your top links shared, and your Twitter application usage.

Beneath the icons are even more tabs. The Friends tab allows you to track your followers who are currently on-line, your followers growth rate, the location of your followers on a world map, the activity of your followers, which followers have retweeted you, your closest Twitter friends, and your friends you have ignored.

The Mentions tab illustrates who you’ve mentioned and who has mentioned you by percentage, with options for separating updates and social mentions. Even though I wasn’t able to get any data for my account at the time of writing this article, the Groups tab appears to separate your followers by occupation, join date, popularity, gender, and actions.

There is no registration required for Twitter Analyzer, but it does allow you to purchase a featured user plan, charging $9.99 for 10,000 views or $39.99 for 100 clicks.

Twistory

Twistory keeps track of your tweets over time, self-labeled as “Twitter + history”. Because it’s very difficult to go back and find your own tweets, Twistory does it for you by integrating with various calendar applications including Google Calendar, iCal, and any other applications that support webcal or iCalendar.

In addition to calendar support, Twistory also provides a chart of daily and weekly tweet counts so you can see just how much you’ve tweeted the last several weeks. Twistory doesn’t require any registration, all you have to do is enter your Twitter username and it does the rest of the work for you.

Xefer

Xefer shows a neat chart of all of your tweets over the course of your Twitter account. It segments each of your tweets according to day of week and time of day and places them on a plot chart, with the size of each point representing the number of tweets for that day and time. Xefer doesn’t require registration to use.

TweetStats

TweetStats provides similar information to Xefer in a slightly different format, bar charts. TweetStats also gives information about who you’ve sent @replies to, who you’ve retweeted, and what interface you’ve used.

If you click on the “Tweet Cloud” button at the top of your screen, TweetStats will also categorize your tweets into a tag cloud and tell you what your top five words are. It does the same for your hashtags.

TweetStats also provides information about Twitter at large including the trending topics for the day, the top 50 trends of all time, the top 10 Twitter apps, and the top 10 people who have been mentioned for the day. TweetStats doesn’t require registration.

Twitter Grader

Twitter Grader is a tool put out by HubSpot and it attempts to measure the “power, reach, and authority of a Twitter account” based on the number of followers, the power of those follower, the number of updates, update recency, follower/following ratio and engagement.

The Twitter Grader tool will make suggestion about how you might be able to improve your Twitter account and also provides a follower history graph, a tweet cloud, and a tool to check if a specific Twitter account is following you.

If you want more statistics about Twitter in general, the “Twitter Elite” section of the website will provide information about the top 100 users on Twitter, as well as the top cities, states, and countries. You can also search for the top 100 users by location. There are a number of other useful Twitter tools on the Twitter Grader website that are worth examining.

TwitterCounter

TwitterCounter allows you to graph your followers, friends, and updates for three different time periods: the last week, the last month, and the last three months. It will also allow you to compare the stats for up to three users at a time. In addition to the chart, TwitterCounter analyzes the results by giving you average growth statistics and tries to predict where you will be tomorrow and 30 days from now.

The TwitterCounter service is free to use and requires no registration, but there is also a featured users premium listing that charges between $49-$549 according to the number of views. TwitterCounter also offers a blog widget called TwitterRemote that shows which Twitter users visit your website.

Track Trending Topics on Twitter

Twitter itself offers a list of trending topics on its website and you can search for any single topic, but sometimes that isn’t enough to tell the whole story. Following trending topics is a good way to create relevant and timely content, be it in the form of a tweet or a blog post, or to stay on top of what’s happening in the world.

TweetMeme

TweetMeme is the Digg of Twitter. It tracks the hottest content on the web measured by the number of retweets and it also categorizes the content according to subject. The main categories are comedy, entertainment, gaming, lifestyle, science, sports, technology, and world & business. Each of the main categories also has sub-categories.

It should be noted that TweetMeme is the maker of the retweet button that is so popular across the web (you can see our retweet button at the top of the post). TweetMeme is free and doesn’t require registration, but if you want, you can login using your Twitter account and TweetMeme will automatically retweet to your account whenever you click on the retweet button.

TwitterStats

TwitterStats is a useful site for tracking trending topics over the last 24 hours. You can compare up to three keywords and TwitterStats will graph the number of times those keywords were tweeted by the hour and it will also give the aggregate number of tweets for each keyword for the past day. TwitterStats is free to use and requires no registration.

Trendistic

Trendistic provides an amazing interactive chart that shows the percentage any keyword phrase has appeared in tweets across all of Twitter. You can compare multiple keyword phrases by entering them in the search bar and separating them with a comma.

When you click on any data point on the graph, the box below the graph will display the tweets about that keyword for that time period. The “Trending Topics” box to the right of the graph shows the topics that are currently popular. Hovering over any keyword will provide a Wikipedia definition and additional information about the popularity of that keyword. You can view the trending topics for up to a week and Trendistic also provides an enhanced archive of the trending topics for today.

Trendistic is free to use, but in order to view the graph for 90 or 180 you need to register with the site. One final feature to mention is that Trendistic allows you to embed any chart in your website and lets you choose between static and dynamic charts.

Monitter

Monitter allows you to track multiple keywords in real-time. Each keyword is shown in a column and displays cascading tweets as they occur. You can choose your own keyword using the same search rules as the Twitter API or you can simply choose to populate the columns with the current trending topics.

In many ways, Monitter is reminiscent of Twitter Clients like TweetDeck or twhirl, but it’s web-based and doesn’t allow you to update your status. However, it does also allow you to limit your search based on location, for example, within 10 miles of Seattle. It also offers a blog widget that you can embed on your website to show live tweets on any keyword.

Monitter is free to use and doesn’t require any registration, but it does offer an advertising program for companies who want their tweets to appear in the update stream. Ad prices aren’t listed, but an email is provided to obtain further information.

Tracking Twitter Traffic

There are several different ways to track Twitter traffic and the spread of your message across Twitter. Some of the tools already mentioned above will allow you to count the number of retweets and estimate your potential audience reach.

If you’ve tweeted a link to your website, it’s easiest to get your tracking data from a program like Google Analytics. However, because of the way Twitter works, there is no possible way to tell who has clicked on a link from a specific Twitter profile- The referrer link will always just indicate Twitter. When trying to guesstimate who has sent you the most traffic, it’s probably best to check using the retweet tracker tools.

Even though you can’t pinpoint the referring account with absolute certainty, you can track a certain amount of click data using a URL-shortening service. If you’ve been using Twitter any length of time, you’ve probably used a URL-shortener, but I’m going to introduce you to several shortners that provide statistics.

Bit.ly

Bit.ly is the biggest, fastest, and most reliable URL-shortener and it’s the only shortener officially supported by Twitter. It shows how many clicks your link has produced and it also indicates how many the page has been viewed through other bit.ly links. Bit.ly also provides data on the number of Twitter and FriendFeed conversations have occurred about the link, the number of comments on the page, and the locations the link has been shared.

There are also several graphs that track clicks and locations by date and in total. The referrers’ chart separates the clicks according to referring sites or applications, but unfortunately, it lumps Email Clients, IM, Air Apps, and Direct traffic together. You can choose to view all of the data for your bit.ly link or the aggregate data for a clicks for the page from bit.ly.

Bit.ly offers a bookmarklet and a browser sidebar to make it easy to shorten any URL and post it to Twitter with just a click of a button. Because it’s also Twitter’s official choice, most third-party applications have integrated it as well through bit.ly’s API.

Su.pr

Su.pr is a URL-shortener created by StumbleUpon and it provides data on the number of clicks and stumbles a URL has received, though the clicks are per shortened URL and the stumbles are aggregate. Su.pr allows you to post to Twitter and Facebook at the same time and you can schedule a tweet up to two weeks in advance at your desired time.

You can view click and stumble data displayed in a graph by clicking the “view stats” link for each URL when viewing your su.pr account. In addition to the graph, the stats page show the number of retweets, who retweeted, and how many followers they have. It also shows the top traffic sources for the URL and who liked the page on StumbleUpon. Finally, by clicking on the reviews link, you can view the StumbleUpon page for the URL.

StumbleUpon does offer a bookmarklet for su.pr, but unfortunately, it doesn’t give you the option to give a thumbs up at the same time you share the link.

Cli.gs

Cli.gs seems to boast the most features of all the URL-shorteners we reviewed. It offers real-time analytics with charts and geo-tagged data. It tracks Twitter and FrienFeed mentions, links from around the web, and Delicious saves for the destination URL. Cli.gs detects search engine bots and uses the search engine friendly 301 redirect on all of its links so that the link power counts toward your page. You can also use customized shortened URLs or multiple URLs for the same page so that you can create and track custom campaigns.

Like bit.ly and su.pr, cli.gs features an API and several tools to make it easier to use, including a browser bookmarklet and blog widgets and plugins.

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