140Char

If you want to find the most popular brands on Twitter in terms of mentions, you could spend some time setting up various monitoring systems. Or you can just go to TweetedBrands and see which 50 companies are getting the most mentions in any one day.

It’s simple and effective for a quick overview, and each mention number links to the appropriate Twitter search.

TweetedBrands

And that’s about it, other than to say it was produced as part of the 24 hour business camp.

Twitter followers for UK national newspapers have been tracked for a while now by Malcolm Coles over at the Online Journalism Blog.

And there are some really interesting insights emerging – besides the fact that at 1,665,202 followers in total, the entire UK news industry has serious competition from the likes of Ashton Kutcher (3,777,896 followers )and Stephen Fry (794,146 followers).

Take out the @guardiantech account, which contributes 1.2 million followers, and things really don’t look brilliant in terms of scale for most accounts – it might look better if you aggregated all Times accounts, for example, but you’d still be in the low tens of thousands, and you’d still be part of a 400,000 (approx) total.

And although there’s reasonable growth, it’s again all skewed towards the Guardian Tech account, which is benefitting heavily from being included in the Suggested User List for new users.

The question is why news sources – which are proving to be pretty popular judging by their homepage statistics – are so much less attractive on Twitter?

I don’t think it’s the wrong location for finding news and information – in fact the opposite is true.

I do think there are potentially two reasons:

1. Perhaps the strength of major media news sources – which has been written about by many people – is in aggregating and providing context and insight into what’s going on, rather than attempting to ‘beat the crowd’ to the first tweet?

But I suspect it’s more likely to be:

2. If you simply plug in an RSS feed and then bugger off, you’ll never get anywhere.

I’ve played around with numerous Twitter analytics and statistic applications, and I have to say that Twitter Analyzer seems to be about the most comprehensive in terms of available information.

It features:-

User stats:- including number of tweets, reach, hashtags, popularity,etc etc.

Friends stats:- including f0llowers growth rate, location, activity and re-tweeting, etc.

Mentions:- including all, social, updates, etc.

Groups:- including by occupation, join date, gender, etc.

And Trends and Fun tabs are apparently ‘coming soon’.

It’s fast after the initial username analysis, and nicely presented, with handy graphs and charts. The biggest flaws currently are that you don’t seem to be able to export the charts and graphs to anywhere else (although there’s a handy ‘Tweet’ option for some of the interesting information you might want to share via Twitter.

It also seems to be limited to the 30 days for a lot of the information, in line with the data and limits that Twitter has. Which is understandable, but also frustrating. If they were able to pull data in on a regular schedule to provide longer timeframes once a username has first been indexed, and enable the ability to export the information for presentations and spreadsheets, it would be a clear leader in Twitter stats and analysis.

tr.im is the latest in a fairly substantial list of services which offer to shorten your links to make them more compatible with microblogging sites like Twitter.

After all, when you’ve only got 140 characters to play with, you don’t want to be posting a lengthy website address – and even better, many of the newer services also include tracking of click-throughs. Particularly useful for marketing professionals to see whether it was their link which got traffic to their content.

tr.im works with Twitter and Indenti.ca and will automatically update your status. It tracks stats, allows comments on your urls, and your account keeps a history of your shortened urls (You can log in with your Twitter details). One of the main ways it stands out from other url shorteners is by offering to retweet popular shortened urls – bonus traffic!

Some of the other popular url shorteners are:

TinyURL is just about the grandaddy of url shortening. It does what it says on the tin, via the website or bookmarklet.

SnipURL: Shortens URLs, allows you to see how many people have clicked on them, and has useful options including showing the long url in brackets when the shortened url is copied – handy if people might mistake your url for a phishing scam etc.

Bit.ly: I started with tinyurl but switched to Bit.ly. It keeps stats for your urls, and splits them between Twitter (seperating out individual pages e.g. those clicking from twitter.com/home and twitter.com/badgergravling, and also those from 3rd party applications. Plus it records any conversations and retweets on Twitter and Friendfeed, comments, and metadata. It’s interesting that Twitterfeed (auto RSS posting to Twitter) seems to be using Bit.ly now. And most interesting is that you can set a custom term for your shortened url address – which can only be used once, so it’s yours forever if you pick a good one!

Some that I haven’t tried, and can’t in any way vouch for,  include:

Notlong:

Shorterlink

Doiop

Shorl

Shorttext

Tinypic (for images).

Zurl

Curio.us

Get-URL

and many many more. Interesting several that I’d heard of appear to have folded due to a combination of problems with hosts or spammers using their service. It’s important to make sure you check who is posting a shortened url before clicking on it, just in case – and obviously be aware if the link takes you to a site requesting any type of login information.

To see all the available url shorteners we’ve encountered, check out the Microblogging tools section.