Dan McDonnell on Uncovering Interesting Facts About Your Twitter Network with Twitonomy

Hello, my name is Dan McDonnell and I am a Community Manager for the American Evaluation Association. With the plethora of social media tools, apps and platforms available, it can often be overwhelming to find the right one to best suit your needs. I recently came across a tool that I’m very excited to share with you all today – one that can open the doors to more interesting insights on your Twitter network.

Rad Resource

Twitonomy  is a powerful Twitter analytics platform that can reveal intriguing statistics about Twitter profiles and hashtags. Let’s start by looking at what things you can learn about your own profile.

Once you’ve signed in via your own Twitter profile, type your Twitter handle into the ‘Analyze Twitter’s profile of’ box, and wait for the results. The next screen (example above) will break down the entirety of your Twitter history (yes, every Tweet you’ve ever sent!) and some cool data points, including how many Tweets a day you send on average, the breakdown of your Tweet responses vs. Retweets vs. @mentions and even a full activity chart that shows what days, times and seasons in which you Tweet most frequently. It looks like 11:00 AM is my sweet spot, and I Tweet pretty consistently Monday through Friday.

Hot Tip

With so many different data points available, it’s tough to even know where to begin. Here are a few things I’d recommend researching with Twitonomy to start:

• See who your interact with most in your network with the Users most mentioned, most retweeted and most replied to statistics.
• Find out what your best performing Tweets of all time are, and use that knowledge to inform what you’re Tweeting about in the future.
• Check out patterns and trends in how your fellow evaluators are Tweeting – which days and times and who they are Tweeting with and about.
• Take a look at some of your favorite Twitter users ‘most frequently used hashtag’ list to see what types of Twitter conversations you might be missing out on.

These few tips are really just scratching the surface of what Twitonomy can do. With a Premium subscription, you can unlock loads of new features – but all of what I’ve outlined so far is doable in the free version of the tool. In a future post, I’ll tackle some of the cool Premium features and what it can reveal to make you a smarter Tweeter. Stay tuned!

Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org. aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.

Dan McDonnell is a regular Saturday contributor to AEA365, where he blogs on social media-related topics for evaluators. You can reach Dan on Twitter at@Dan_McD.