If you’re online as an entrepreneur, then you are likely using Twitter as one of your social networking tools.

While doing research for a project I’m working on, I have come across hundreds of tools that either support or enhance the twitter experience. Many of the tools are quite familiar while others you hear little about.

In this series of articles on Twitter Productivity, I will focus in on specific tools and their uses and benefits.

This article will cover 6 statistic gathering tools that I found to be easy to use and very informative. If you are not using some of these, you may want to check them out.

TweetStats

Found at TweetStats.com, this tool provides a lot of information about your Twitter account. Simply enter you username on the home page and it will process your stats and provide a nice page of graphs for you. The results will cover your timeline, replies, the interface used and a host of other charts with detailed information showing you exactly how you’ve spent your Twitter time.

Above is a look at my timeline since February 09 when I first signed up to Twitter. Since this article is written in mid November, the far right column is incomplete and will likely come close to doubling.

At the top of the page you will see two buttons, as pictured above. The Tweet Cloud button produces a word cloud that shows your most commonly used words or terms. Hovering your mouse over them shows the number of mentions or uses for each. There is also a hashtag cloud generated that has the same functionality.

Returning to the upper right corner of the page, you can click on the “trends” link, where a couple of graphs and a large trend cloud is generated. Another way to find out what people are talking about.

Twitter Analyzer

Twitter Analyzer is a really nice tool with a host of features. The user tab provides stats on your tweets, popularity, links, apps and other data. The friends tab will graph your followers who are currently online, show your followers growth rate, a cool density map and other features.

Of particular interest is the “Disregarded Friends” feature that shows you friends that sent you a tweet but did not get an answer back from you. As conversations go, some of these did not require an answer, but there are times when we simply loose a tweet in the stream. This feature allows you to recover that actual tweet and respond if needed.

The group and mentions tabs also provide tons of info. Additionally, you may become a featured user by purchasing a campaign. This can be helpful for a specific product launch or the targeting of a specific group or geographic community.

Twitalyzer

Twitalyzer is a very good tool for measuring your social media impact. You are rated on influence, generosity, signal to noise, clout and velocity.

Twit Graph

As the name implies, Twit Graph is another graph generating tool. Similar to TweetStats, this provides graphs in a pie-chart fashion.

The “tweets by day” chart was particularly helpful, as it shows you your activity peaks and valleys.

TweetBurner

Tweetburner provides near live monitoring of tweets. Here you will find the most popular tweets in the last hour and the top 10 urls clicked during the last hour. Again, nice ways to monitor current and up to date topics. The very top of the page has the handy Twurl url shortener.

Twitter Grader

This tool actually assigns you a grade based on the power, reach and authority of your tweets. This is all included in an algorithm which is attempting to measure your impact. Like Google, Twitter Grader will not divulge too much info about the algorithm to avoid people trying to game the system, but there is a nice explanation in this article entitled How Does Twitter Grader Calculate Twitter Rankings.

I was actually surprised by my grade, having never checked it before, but I’ll take it.

It should be noted that these stats are based on your updates from the Twitter web site and do not include other client software like Tweetdeck and Hootsuite.

Conclusion

Here’s to hoping you find these tools useful to your online experience. A combination of 2 or more of them will provide you with all sorts of data that may assist you in targeting your market or adjusting your overall strategy.

If you are using some other Twitter statistic gathering tool besides those listed here, please include it in the comments section below.

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