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This post is a part of the overall Twitter for Business series here at the Internet Marketing for Real Estate blog. Once you get into Twitter for awhile you (or our boss) will want to know what good it is doing. Here are some links to posts and articles about Twitter measurement tools and techniques.

Measuring advertising and marketing efforts that use Twitter as a distribution medium/source

Increasingly, we see that Twitter is being used to blast away with “Hey check out my latest post” and “use my great service” etc. Perhaps a bit obnoxious to the non-commercial user of Twitter. If your marketing strategy for Twitter does not involve annoying your followers into submission, perhaps you might consider measuring your activity and finding out which topics are most interesting to your followers. Here’s where you can really use social media to advantage. Check out these reviews on using Twitter in conjunction with your advertising and marketing efforts:

• Before you even get started, you might want to know more about who is using Twitter and how are they using it. Jeremiah Owyang has decoded HP Lab’s Twitter research for you.
• Twittertise is an analytics and Tweet-delay service that helps you plan and track your advertising messages.
• Measure web traffic you generate via Twitter by combining TinyURL and Google Analytics. Justin Cutroni tells all.
• Use Tweetburner to measure your relevance on Twitter.
• Measure your relevance on Twitter with Cli.gs and get some 301 redirect action from it as well.
• Anil Batra has some initial KPIs for Twitter use on his blog.
• The Webtrends Blog has published a method for tracking Twitter and Facebook marketing campaigns with Webtrends.
• An important concept to Twitter message spreading is the Retweet. Dan Zarella outlines some metrics for understanding how and when a message is repeated over Twitter via a Retweet.

Measuring brands, topics and conversations on Twitter

Since Twitter is a quick, easy and in-the-moment communication medium, a lot of different things are discussed each minute. Perhaps you’re interested in buzz measurement or looking for some insight into what the Twittersphere currently finds interesting.

• If you want to use free tools to figure out how much of the Twittersphere is talking about something, check out our Twist and Tweetrush method.
• If your brand/topic isn’t very large, perhaps you could measure the conversation using Tweetbeep and Tweetrush
• Here’s a brief case study about the impact of the 2008 Seinfeld ads on Microsoft’s brand as measured via Twitter.

Measuring individual activity on Twitter

Perhaps you are interested in what someone’s Twitter usage is like. Maybe they are claiming to be a social media marketing whiz-bang genius and you want to check out their credentials. That sort of thing. Or maybe you’re just a stalker. There are a variety of tools available to measure people’s use of Twitter.

• Xefer is a tool that shows hourly, monthly and daily breakdown of twitter usage. It also shows followers. It is limited to the most recen 800 Twitter posts.
• Adam Fullerton gives a quick snapshot of Hubspot’s Twitter Grader, a tool for checking how complete your Twitter profile is among other things.
• Mashable gives an excellent overview of a tool called Tweeple Twak. Learn about your follow/unfollow rate, locations of your followers and more. Probably the closest thing to GA for Twitter I’ve seen yet. If only it would have a built-in URL shortener or partner with someone like Cli.gs then it would be slam dunk.
• Respected Web Analyst Nick Arnet puts together an excellent blog post on measuring influence on Twitter.

If I’ve missed something good please don’t hesitate to let me know in the comments section.

KDPaine linked to my post about measuring the conversation and noted the problem of measuring conversation share for smaller business: if your brand doesn’t generate much chatter you just won’t show up at all in Tweetrush. Here are a few quick thoughts on this.

Ever wonder how many different “Tweets” are released into the Twittersphere each day? That’s what Tweetrush tells you. At first glance, it’s probably not much more than an entertaining look at how other people waste their time. Then you realize that you’re wasting your time seeing how much time their wasting and so on.

Let’s see if we can use Tweetrush and Twist to inform our decision-making.