Simple blog post on using twitter for digital marketing;

Because Twitter has an open API (application programming interface), you can measure a lot more on Twitter than elsewhere. This is largely because developers have built dozens and dozens of analytic tools on top of Twitter. When using Twitter, all of these can help you understand the reach and frequency of the 140-character tweets.

You can learn a lot about the number of people who may get your tweets, how many are retweeted, and which influencers will help you the most. But there’s something you need to keep in mind: What you can’t find out is who those actual people are who are reading the tweets. So don’t expect to get information from Twitter the same level of detail on your customers that you do when you run banner campaigns across the Internet. Although here’s what you can find out from Twitter:

• Brand mentions: The first and most basic metric for Twitter is knowing how your brand is mentioned and with what frequency on Twitter. Twitter Search (http://search.twitter.com) lets you scan all published tweets for mentions of your brand. TweetVolume can also help with understanding the volume of tweets about your brand.

• Influence: You can measure influence in Twitter more directly than in any other social platform. With tools like Twinfluence (www.twinfluence.com), you can measure the reach, velocity, and social capital of anyone on Twitter, including your own brand. As you follow people and they follow you, you can use Twinfluence to determine the potential reach of your tweets based on who retweets them. Twitter Grader also computes a username’s relative ranking compared to other users on Twitter. Twitterank tells you your rank versus other Twitter uses. That, too, can be considered a measure of influence.

• Pass-along and click-through: Knowing how much your influencers tweet about you is very important to track as well. The best way to do this is by continuously scanning the list of tweets that mention your brand or your username specifically. This helps you understand how much you’re being retweeted. Dashboards like TweetDeck can make this tracking much easier because they allow you to list multiple search terms and see all your replies (basically, tweets that reference your username) in one place.

In addition to tracking tweets that have been passed along, you may want to understand how many tweets have resulted in clicks to your Web site. This is where services like bit.ly and Tweetburner come in handy as you can shorten Web site addresses using these services for your Tweets. But the greatest benefit is that when you do so, you can track the exact number of people who clicked the link in your tweet over time. For example, if you’re promoting a special discount, you can tweet about that discount and include a link to the page on your Web site using bit.ly. You can see, on an hourly basis, the number of people who actually click the link in your tweet. That way, you can determine the number of clicks and the number of people who took advantage of the discount.