The beauty of this Excel Spreadsheet is that it builds a history on your computer of the count of Tweets and followers of up to 175 People.

Get it here:

Refresh it as often as you like: hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly and track how active they are, and how their popularity is trending.

Each time it runs, it adds a new data column to a data worksheet which can be used as a dashboard.

It also creates two new files on your computer which can be used in a dashboard or uploaded to a data server.

SETUP

Copy/paste a list of Twitter screennames into a green box of the Competitive Tracker sheet. You do not need to enter the @ symbol.

Add more rows as desired, up to 175 because the limit is 350 Twitter API calls per hour, and this report does two calls per screename.

Add Twitter Screen names into each cell of the green box.

Repeat as required; you can copy/insert additional rows if you need them.

Now you’re ready for the next and final step. It’s your choice how frequently to refresh this data.  Each time you refresh, a new data column is added to a data worksheet. You’ll want a column header that indicates when the refresh occurs.  You enter the name of the new data column in cell D24.  Here are some suggestions that you can paste into that cell:

=TEXT(TODAY(),”yyyy-mm-dd”)  produces “2011-06-28″

=TEXT(TODAY(),”mmm dd”)  produces “Jun 28″

=TEXT(TODAY(),”mmmm dd, yyyy”)  produces “June 28, 2011″

When you press the Refresh button, I get the following view:

[TWITTER-TRACKER-SAMPLE-RESULT]

Each time I run this, a new column is added to that list. For

some pages, such as Coca-cola, you can run this every minute and see the numbers change !

You can use this worksheet as data for a dashboard that you author.

It also creates two data files named myTW-followers-history.csv and myTW-statuses-history.csv. You can import these files into a database for reporting purpose. They are located in your documents\nextanalytics\data subdirectory.