It's hard to believe that Twitter is no longer the darling social network it once was, in light of relative newcomers like Quora, Pinterest, and Vine. However, Twitter remains a marketing powerhouse, especially for B2C brands who understand the social network's potential in regards to customer acquisition, brand loyalty, and customer service. While there are many tools for analyzing your own efforts, few competitive analysis tools exist that can allow marketers to glean an understanding of a competitor's Twitter strategy. Here are three free competitive analysis tools that you can use to see how your competition is leveraging Twitter.
HubSpot's Dan Zarrella conceived TweetCharts while flying somewhere over the midwest. The tool allows you to run a report on any hashtag, word, phrase, username, and even URL. Depending on the volume of activity for your chosen query, the report can span a date range of anywhere from one week to one day.
Reports consist of a breakdown of activity type, tweet frequency, and user rankings.
TweetCharts is ideal for at-a-glance data on the kinds of tweets a user sends out and how often.
Twitalyzer designates itself as "Serious Analytics for Social Business." Their sleek interface focuses on two metrics: impact and influence.
While TweetCharts gives you a breakdown of the anatomy of a user's tweets, Twitalyzer measures their effectiveness. While their proprietary metric (Impact) isn't terribly insightful, a Twitalyzer report can show days in which an account exerted peak influence and show what users influence that account.
Simply Measured has several free social analytics tools available, one of which is the Free Twitter Follower Report. Despite a slight barrier to entry - users must enter a Twitter account to be analyzed, tweet that they are using the tool, register by name and email address and wait for the report to generate - Simply Measured will email you a rich examination focusing on the followers of any given account.
Metrics include Top Keywords Within Followers' Profile Descriptions, Followers by Time Zone, Followers by Date of Last Tweet, and Users by # of Followers, among others. This tool is great for getting an idea of who is following an account and how they're interacting.
The most successful social media campaigns differentiate themselves from those of the competition, and in order to differentiate yourself on Twitter, you must first understand the activities of your competitors and capitalize on any gaps in their strategy. What other social media analytics tools do you use? Let us know in the comments below.
