Twitter tracking tools are an often overlooked area of bloggers’ marketing arsenal. Most bloggers realize that Twitter has a serious potential for driving targeted traffic as well as gaining access to others who will spread your content like a viral machine. Yet, a considerable amount of bloggers never dig deeper into the conversations on Twitter, leaving out huge opportunities for growing readership, conversations, and marketing power.
Twitter Tracking Tools for Bloggers
Tools that help you dig deeper into the millions of conversations happening on Twitter are important for bloggers for many reasons. First, you’ll gain insight into the areas of content that are hot and trending topics of discussion at the moment. By following Twitter trends you can make your blog more relevant, which can inturn create a great area of traffic.
If you’re a local business using blogging as a communication and relationship building tool, tracking local Twitter conversations can not only help you be more relevant – but you’ll also gain access to additional Twitter peeps who can help you spread your blog virally, locally. Not to mention, these same tools can also help you understand who to connect to based on influence and analyze not only what people are saying, but how and why they are saying it by measuring sentiment and beyond.
And, perhaps the most important reason for all bloggers to start using Twitter tracking tools is the fact that each and everyone you select, based on the information provided, can and will help you gain incredible insight during your listening and monitoring activities (I call this gathering Impact intelligence). You’ll understand what people are talking about, what they are not talking about, the flow of the conversations, and much more. As with everything else in social media marketing — the deeper you dig, the better “feel” you get to help you make more intelligent marketing decisions.
Best Twitter Tracking Tools
Twitter’s popularity is insanely high and tools seems to pop up daily. Here’s the list of best Twitter tracking tools that we use consistently and have found to be the most useful.
Happ.in
Happn.in collects and aggregates popular phrases used on Twitter within 20 miles of major cities. The ten most popular phrases each hour are posted to this site, and are tweeted four times a day to the Happn.in Twitter account for each city. To receive updates for your city, you simply click the ‘follow’ link below your city on the home page. This is a great tool for small and local businesses.
Hashtags
Hashtags.org will allow you to easy follow the trends of popular (and not so popular) hashtags across Twitter on just about any topic that exists. What’s great about this, is that most hashtags are used for Twitter chats, or creating the ability to follow topics across users and platforms, giving you the ability to connect with peeps based on those same topics and chats.
Klout
Klout is a great tool for tracking influence across your social graph (your connections and beyond). You’ll be able to see how your opinions, recommendations, and shared links actually spread throughout your social graph and gain valuable insight into your actual influence. More importantly, you can also check out other Klout users and gain insight into their influence.
Re: Tweetist
Retweetist is one of my favorite Twitter tracking tools because it allows you to discover more people, more topics, more trends to help you effectively grow your Twitter following and connection to conversations. You can check the status of the top Twitter peeps by amounts of retweets they receive, and also do the same for URLs, or those that are retweeted the most. Great information to take a look at.
Tweetmeme
If you’re a techie like me, you like to follow hot trends and topics as they happen (although I don’t recommend this for the newbie). Tweetmeme is a great way to see hot topics by link/URL as they happen, and within a certain timeframe or topic. It’s a ton of information to filter through but a great tool for the advanced Twitter user.
Twitter Tracking Recommendations
As with everything on the social web, start small and focused. There really is no need to be an obsessive compulsive information filter on anything and everything that happens in a particular topic. Your goal should be to focus on what is intelligence information for you and your business, period.
Also, set yourself to a schedule. Don’t attempt to filter information daily and randomly, you’ll lose track of time and get lost in a sea of information. Unless you’re planning on becoming the next Mashable or MarketingPilgrim with constant updates throughout the day on breaking news, segment your time and do it consistently – rather than obsessively.
I personally have two times a week set aside to stay abreast of what’s going down throughout Twitter. I spend an hour each time, filtering and making note of what’s relevant in my Impact spreadsheet (my marketing spreadsheet) and I go back to it to dig deeper. I know my audience is more interested in relevant, helpful information than hot topics and trends of the day — so that is where my focus is.
The point is, figure out what’s your purpose in digging deeper into Twitter and how can you use the information you’re finding to help you better connect, communicate, and empower your audience.
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Looking forward to connecting with you!
Maria 
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