Below is an excerpt from David Lee King's Library Technology Reports (vol. 48, no. 6) Running the Digital Branch: Guidelines for Operating the Library Website.
At Topeka Shawnee County Public Library, we track quite a few numbers and statistics each month, including social media numbers. Though we don’t report out on them, they are useful for internal tracking and growth. Some social media tools provide useful analytics. YouTube and Facebook, for example, both provide a monthly analytics section. Other tools, like Twitter or Flickr, don’t provide great ways to gather statistics. You can count statistics manually, or you can use a third-party tool. Here are a few options for metrics on Twitter activity.
HootSuite
HootSuite lets you track quite a few things for your Twitter profile, including profile summary, mentions by influencers, keyword over time, compare keywords, follower growth, and Twitter sentiment. It does, however, cost $5.99 a month or more (you have to pay for the Pro account to get statistics).
Twitter Counter
Twitter Counter works great, and it’s free. Twitter Counter allows you to get these stats: followers, following, Tweets, mentions, and Retweets. It tracks them hourly, weekly, monthly, and in three-month and six-month time frames.
Twitaholic
Twitaholic shows your rank compared to all Twitter users. One cool thing it does is show your Twitter rank by location, which is a really sneaky way to find other top Twitter users in your area.
TweetStats
TweetStats is another good tool. It is slow, so enter in your Twitter account name, then go get a cup of coffee and come back. What’s it show? Plenty—including a monthly “how many Tweets” graph, the day and time that you tend to tweet, aggregate daily and hourly Tweets, your top replies to people, who you retweet the most, and the Twitter interfaces you use. This tool is more internally focused for the individual Twitter user, but it will give you a handy snapshot of who YOU are as a Twitter user.