Open Question: Is There A Uniform Twitter Metric Out There?

How do you measure the amount of original tweets on Twitter about your news? Is there such a thing as a metric? With Twitter, you’re going to find that when someone wants to talk about your product, company or news, it’s relatively difficult to assess how much talking has been done. Why? It’s because there’s not a uniform way of calculating that statistic. While we both can find a great article in the New York Times, it won’t be the same link – we’ll use different URL shorteners, for one…whether it’s bit.ly, tinyurl, etc, so by doing a search for the New York Times article’s exact URL would prove fruitless. Secondly, by looking for a specific tweet as dictated by the article based on the context is also difficult because users have the option to modify the wording if they so choose. In taking a look at a Mashable article, in clicking on the Tweetmeme link, it provides me with the following basic tweet that I can share:

RT @mashable HOW TO: Donate to Chile Relief Online http://bit.ly/aVE7ic

Of course, being lazy or minimizing the work that I’d need to do, I’d simply push that out on Twitter. However, if I wanted to add some more missing data or other words to the tweet, I’m free to do so – therefore it’s impossible to track all the tweets that reference that specific article.

So what options do we have?

That’s the part that leads to some confusion…because there doesn’t seem to be any uniform Twitter metric system out there for agencies, companies or marketers to figure out just how can they track all activity. Obviously I think Tweetmeme would be a helpful tool out there because it shows you how many times that one article has been retweeted. In taking the Mashable.com article I references above concerning Chile, as of this writing, it has received 1836 tweets. That number is significant because when I want to know how many different media has covered a story my company, client or competitor has produced, I would be very much inclined to reference that information since it will simplify the amount of work needed to be done. Even so, this would have to be a part of every news and blog website out there, but unfortunately there probably won’t be that type of consensus ever.

Twitter will most undoubtably plague the world of web analytics for the next several years as people try and figure out just how to put together these metrics. However, I’d like to know what secrets and tips you may have used in your reporting or understanding of Twitter analytics.

Is there a uniform Twitter metric or tool we should get behind in order to show a better ROI to each other?

Image Credit: Guitargoa