How to Calculate Monthly Twitter Reach

Measuring the impact of your social media efforts is notoriously difficult; there's no direct, monetary return on investment, and everyone's definition of "success" is different. However, most businesses that begin a social media campaign want to see some evidence of its success or failure, and several companies have stepped up to offer measurement tools. Several websites -- many free, some not -- will analyze the effectiveness of your Twitter account in reaching and engaging your audience.

Instructions

1. Set up an account at Klout.com. This free service measures the influence you have on your followers, taking into account how often your tweets are retweeted or replied to, as well as how engaged those followers are with your message. Klout calculates these values against each other and gives you a total score on a scale of 0 to 100. You can also connect Klout to your Facebook account to include metrics from that profile.

2. Enter a Twitter username, topic or hashtag at TweetReach.com. For free, you can get a general report of how many people may have seen specific tweets within the last week. There is a fee for monthly reports and more in-depth analytics.

3. Get Twitalyzed. Twitalyzer.com, like Klout, gives you scores based on your number of followers, unique mentions and retweets, frequency of updates and other data. Twitalyzer's Impact Score will tell you which percentile you're in, which can give you a general idea of how you're doing compared to your peers.

Tips & Warnings

• Services that don't ask to authenticate your Twitter account usually require your tweets to be unprotected before they can analyze your tweets. Keeping your tweets public will help you reach a wider audience.

References

• Klout
• TweetReach
• "The NonProfit Times"; What's It Cost? ROI of social media can be an intangible
• Twitalyzer