How to Analyze Twitter Usage and Followers

All of us here know the importance of social media and its relationship with traffic generation. In fact, I’m willing to bet most readers here are freakishly good at using social media in an enticing or creative way to get more clicks onto your blog.
However, even having extremely eloquent or eye-catching tweets doesn’t always ensure social media success. Sometimes, other lurking variables come into play. Perhaps you’ve been tweeting too much about one topic or perhaps too much in a short period of time.

For whatever reason, there comes a point in every blogger’s social media campaign when they realize that people are unfollowing them. This is huge. This is more important though who’s clicking the links on your tweets because when someone unfollows you, that is one person who may never click a link to your site again.
When someone stops following you on Twitter, you need to first realize that this has actually happened. Twitter doesn’t have a built-in function to tell you when or who unfollows you, but there are plenty of third party services that can tell you this and more (outlined below). Then you need to examine why they unfollowed you:

• Were they just thinning down their follow list?
• Did they unfollow after a controversial tweet or link to a controversial post?
• Did they unfollow after a quick rush of multiple tweets?
• Did they unfollow you after a series of tweets on one type of topic?

Keep this same mindset when examining your retweets and @mentions as well. Every interaction on social media has a consequence, and you need to understand which interactions prompt which consequences and tweet accordingly. Fortunately there are plenty of third party tools on Twitter to help track these types of things.

TwUnfollow or Qwitter

These two applications offer similar services with only slight deviations. With Qwitter, you’re sent daily email summaries of who stopped following you on Twitter. TwUnfollow offers almost the same service but also gives you the option of receiving instant email notifications showing who unfollows you the second the scoundrel does it. For a monthly fee through Qwitter, you can track multiple accounts through one Qwitter account and see what your last tweet was before being unfollowed.
SocialOomph
This multipurpose web application offers a variety of services – some free and others requiring a fee – for both Twitter and Facebook. I do really appreciate that I can schedule tweets, extend profiles, track keywords, and view @mentions and retweets for free. There are quite a few features that they offer for their “professional” account, but for $30 a month, it may not be worth it for some.

TweetEffect
Want to know which tweets ruined your influence on Twitter? TweetEffect is an exceptional service that shows you when you lost and gained followers in relation to your tweets. All you have to do is enter your Twitter name into the site, and it will display your last 200 tweets, showing which tweets gained and lost followers.

TwitterCounter

For all you data-heads who love analyzing data and statistics, meet the new love of your life, TwitterCounter. For those of you who hate statistics, use this anyway. While it doesn’t identify specific instances or names of unfollowers, it offers a broader scope of your social media presence. For no fee, you can view weekly, monthly, and 3-monthly trends of your followers, following, and tweets. You can also view 6-month trends by promoting TwitterCounter with a tweet.