The Twitter API is wide open.  You can get data not just on yourself, not just on your friends and followers, but also your competitors and peers.

Most Twitter tools give you stats as-of-the-moment.  Very few if any let you build history for longer term analysis of trends and outliers, patterns, and correlation.  Maybe some do, but at what cost?  Next Analytics is just $199 per year — they probably cost that per month to do what I’m about to show you how to do.

Next Analytics lets you do keep history on all those people, build your own library of data and create your own analytics, all from your own PC.

Basically, you can track historically. Basic information includes:

• Frequency of tweets, retweets, number of followers, influence of followers, hashtags (memberships), urls (sources), mentions, and ratios
• These can be trended, outliers discovered, and activity by day in month, day in week, hour in day
• Lists of names and some profile information.  The lists can be processed using Basket Analysis (aka joiners and leavers) so you can focus on the changes and new information. You can get very targeted lists of those who saw a tweet, retweet, hashtag or keyword.
• Get a list of the people that comment or retweet.  Those are their advocates and critics.  Find out the influence of their advocates, find out what they’re saying, find out what they’re tweeting about.

Our advice is to build a history of level of activity  as the first step to learning more about them.

• get a list of their recent tweets and any links they shared (to learn where they get their content)
• frequency of their tweets,
• frequency of their distinct tweets,
• how often their tweets get retweeted (old and new style),
• how many people are following them
• any hashtags they used (to get their memberships/interests)
• any links they used (to learn what they are recommending, where they’re getting info and it’s originality and influence)

Of the retweets,

• get counts and a list of screennames who saw the retweet (can be recursive, down the tree)

Of the followers,

• get a list and count of their recent tweets
• get a list of their recent hashtags and other screennames mentioned in their tweets (to get their memberships/interests)
• get a list of their recent tweets and any links they shared (to get where they get their content)

If you provide a list of keywords,

• get a list of mentions of that keyword (from entire twitter sphere or filtered by list of screennames).

To track influence:

• how often their screenname gets mentioned.
• The ratio of following to followers, because it’s known they are often proportional due to twitter courtesy practices.
• How many followers they have.

There’s plenty of actionable data in getting answers to those questions. Folks, this is not rocket science. Next Analytics can deliver this.  And the dashboards are automatically refreshable – no touch, just let it run, and enjoy the data!

• Use our software to link this to Facebook and LinkedIn.  What are their hobbies, interests, location? Tie your social media together.
• Are they mentioning your brand? Are they mentioning keywords you track?  Are they mentioning keywords you should be tracking?
• Become friends with their friends and followers, Follow them in Twitter, and even get them into conversations.

What can you do with this kind of information? Here’s some ideas:

• Add new keywords to your pay-per-click campaigns
• Add them to your in bound marketing web content, perfect for long tail content generation
• Contact and become friends with potential brand advocates, monitor what they’re saying

Most of what I’ve talked about are done with custom queries that you can build using our user interface in the Windows PowerPack.

If you are looking for something more turnkey, for rapid ROI, here’s some sample Excel Twitter dashboards:

Tweets-Retweets-Mentions.xls
Tweets-Retweets-Mentions.xlsx
Twitter-Friends-And-Followers.xls
Twitter-Friends-And-Followers.xlsx
TwitterFollowersAnalysis.xls
TwitterFollowersAnalysis.xlsx
TwitterReferencesAnalysis.xls
TwitterReferencesAnalysis.xlsx
TwitterTagCloud.xlsm