Brad Rourke

Reviewing How I'm Doing With Twitter

I was just reviewing things as 2009 draws to a close. One thing I was curious about was my Twitter usage. Like many of my friends, 2009 marked a year of significant ramp-up with all forms of social media and especially Twitter, which I first started using in March 2007. So, how do things stack up?

First, I used Tweetstats and Twittercounter to get some basic analytics:

  • Average updates per day: 11.8 (pretty good)
  • Most updates in day: Friday, followed by Tuesday
  • Time of day with the most updates: 10am, followed by 5pm and 9am (I need to work on more early afternoon updates, when more people are using Twitter)
  • Perecentage of “retweets”: 3.8% (I really need to increase that)
  • Percentage of “@” replies: 17.3% (pretty good)
  • Followers: 1,360, was 1,202 three months ago (pretty good)
  • Twitter lists I’m on: 42

All in all, I am pretty happy with these numbers.

I do need to make progress on retweeting others’ material more, I was a bit disappointed to see such a low percentage. What does that mean? It means that, according to the analytics program, I do not share others’ work as much as I could. (Admittedly, it undercounts because it only counts instances of the phrase “RT” which is the convention on Twitter — but often I share material without using the RT term instead opting for “via” or “by” which I believe does not get counted.) As I have said many times, the essence of social media is sharing others’ work, so I need to work on that.

Tweetstats also gave me a rundown of the terms I use most often in my Twitter updates, which I plugged into Wordle to generate a nice word cloud. I was happy with what I saw:

What I Tweet About
What I Tweet About (click to enlarge)

See? The person I mention most is @andreajarrell — those who know me know why this is important! And those words “Thanks” and “Today” give me a nice sense of carpe diem.

Interested in getting ramped up yourself on Twitter? I have written a few how-to’s that might help:

  1. How to get set up
  2. Tips for newbies (what to do once you’re set up)
  3. Tips for intermediate users

Some tips appear on more than one list, as I wrote these all at different times.

How are you doing with your Twitter usage?

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3 responses to “Reviewing How I'm Doing With Twitter”

  1. bradrourke

    Thanks, Andrea and Angelique!

  2. Andrea jarrell

    I love the transparency of this post. Very cool. What a great role model you are. (and not just because I’m aj ;)

  3. Angelique

    Ah, the RT tyranny. I know it well. There are many times that “via” and “by” are far more appropriate, but tracking programs only care about RT. As one of your regular readers, I’m sure you share more than 3.8%, if only because you “via” Andrea’s articles all the time. (Or maybe you do that on Facebook and I’m getting my social networks mixed up.)

    I know a way to painlessly increase your RT percentage: Be sure to RT me every day! ;)

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