The Twitter API has enables a slew of tools and gadgets to extend Twitter’s functionality. Let’s have a look at a few of them that may enhance your Twitter experience:
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Twitter Influence Calculator – Taking various factors such as number of retweets, follower ratio and posting frequency into account, the Twitter Influence Calculator comes up with a value for your “influence” on Twitter (well, you wouldn’t expect it to do anything else, would you?) Whilst this is an artificial metric to one extent, it does reward generosity (by retweeting others’ tweets) and usefulness (by encouraging you to improve your signal to noise ratio). Having said that, it can be good to see your influence value increasing as you continue to tweet. Perhaps not something to be taken absolutely seriously, but interesting.
You can see my influence rating here. -
TwitterCounter – TwitterCounter tracks the number of followers you have over time. This can be interesting to see whether you are gaining or losing people, but the site also projects your future follower numbers giving you the estimated number of followers you will have tomorrow, or any number of days you choose into the future. The projections are, of course, based on past performance and will be a little inaccurate, but they are often a fairly good indication of trends. A rather nice touch is that you can also grab the code to put your follower count on your website, offering social proof of your authority… or popularity.
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Tweetburner – If you’ve ever wanted to know how many people clicked on the links you shared on Twitter, Tweetburner is the answer. Any URLs you share using twurl.nl will be picked up by Tweetburner and tracked, telling you how often your friends and followers actually looked at the website you were talking about. Tweetburner have currently disabled the personal stats page, but you can still see stats for individual links you posted.
There are, of course, loads more Twitter tools and sites out there. These are the three I’ve been using most lately, but what are you using? Share your tips and tell us in the comments! And while we’re thinking about Twitter, why not follow me too?
Thanks for useful information. I’m new to twister, this article help me much.
It was great to meet up in person, thanks for a great time! Much appreciated! http://johnager.co.uk/2009/02/11/22-jan-11-feb-2009/ :-)
No problem Lori, glad you found it useful!
It was indeed great to meet up, John – who says the Internet and social media is just for people who don’t like talking in real life? :)