Analyze your Flock for Targeted Tweeting

I've been using Twitter now for the better part of a year but I'll be honest: I have little idea of how successfully I'm using it. By one measure--number of followers--I'm doing pretty well. I have close to 300 followers now. Yet I'm bothered by a simple fact. Many of my peers in the writing community of thousands of followers. What to do?

This has to be a common question for Twitterers. You send your tweets out there (experts suggest you tweet 4 to 20 times a day) but do they really hit the mark? Are your followers glad they're walking in your digital wake?

Aside from noting the sheer number of followers you're amassing, you can also track how often your messages are re-tweeted by others. Obviously, if others are resending your tweets then they've found your messages valuable. Great! (These retweets, are called "mentions" and are easy to track with a free tool called TweetDeck.)

Now, proceeding from there, what can you do to build your base and keep your followers fed?

Try TwitterSheep (and, in case you're wondering it does feel strange to type such words). With TwitterSheep you can get a quick visual fix on your followers' interests. Just enter your Twitter username in the box to view a tag cloud built from the bios of your followers.

When I did that I found out something surprising that I can use to tailor my tweets in the future. As an author of many books about e-commerce I assumed most of my followers were looking for tweets about eBay, Amazon, monetizing web sites, and so on. Not so much. eBay was there in the cloud all right, but so small had it been a non virtual cloud it would have created merely a puddle. A downpour, however, would have resulted from tweets about social media marketing and related topics.

So much for tweeting about eBay.

I'll use this information when I choose my topics for my future tweets. Most of the time, that is. I still like eBay.