How to Track Tweets
If you Tweet or if your company is using Twitter as a method of promoting business, it is necessary to track the impact your tweets and tweets about your company have. A variety of downloadable desktop applications and websites offer individuals and business the ability to track individual messages, as well as Twitter hashtags and retweets. While most services perform similar functions, each has a different user interface. You may want to try tracking your tweets with multiple services until you determine which site or application's interface you prefer.
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Instructions
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Track hashtags specific to you or your company to monitor responses to your tweets that were not sent as direct replies to your Twitter account. For example if your company's name is Abcxyz123 and you use the hashtag #Abcxyz123 when you discuss your company, you can set up a column for this hashtag in a third party client such as Hootsuite, TweetDeck or Research.ly to continually monitor new tweets sent with your company's hashtag. Alternatively, you can use the Twitter search function to look up your hashtag.
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Monitor direct mentions of your company to view replies to your tweets and comments directed specifically toward your Twitter account. Putting an "@" symbol in front of your username and plugging it into the search bar on Twitter allows you access to direct mentions while third party downloads and sites allow you to dedicate an entire column to continually monitoring tweets that feature @yourusername.
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Track traffic directed from your tweets to your company website, personal webpage or a third-party site through the use of trackable URL-shortening links. Because of the 140-character limit in a tweet, a number of URL-shortener sites exist which convert a long link to a minimum number of characters. Services like bit.ly and Hootsuite's built-in link shortener allow you to view statistics that relate the number of clicks and site traffic each URL featured in your tweets has generated.
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View retweets of your Twitter messages by searching for a string of words that appeared in a series in your tweet or for a specific shortened URL if one appeared within your tweet. This is another task that the Twitter search function accomplishes quite nicely. Measuring the number of retweets your content receives and the number of people who retweet your messages is a good way to gauge the effectiveness of your or your company's social media strategy.
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Tips & Warnings
A Twitter hashtag is any word that starts with the "#" symbol. Twitter users place the "#" in front of key topics in their tweets to participate in Twitter conversations, trending topics and to make their tweets easily searchable within the topic that the hashtag represents.
