Orange County Register

Confused about Twitter? sOCial sunday has your man! Kevin Sablan is the leader of the Register’s web task force and blogs independently about hyperlinks on Almighty Link. This week’s “twip” …

How do you know that your Twitter efforts are paying off? Well, the first thing you need to do is figure out what you hope to achieve with your tweets. Then, set related goals and use these tools to see if you are reaching them:

• Engagement: If you’re in the business of building relationships, I’ll assume you already send tweets to individual people instead of just broadcasting your message. But how often do people mention or respond to you? You don’t need a special tool for this one. Just go to Twitter and click on the @username link on the right side of the page, directly under the “Home” link. If you’re new to Twitter, aim for an average of at least three mentions per day.
• Retweets: If you want to spread your message to a wide audience, you need to see if your messages are being  retweeted — quoted and sent by other users. You can use Twitter’s built-in search and look for “@username rt OR via OR retweet”(Substitute @username for your name, of course!) For example, here is a search for retweets of the Register’s main account, @OCReggie.
• Followers: If you’re a celebrity — or a brand trying to gain popularity, you probably want to grow your following. Again, you can just use the Twitter web site:  just look at the right side of your Twitter page to see how many people are following you.
• Traffic: If you’re in the business of serving advertisements on your page, your need to drive traffic to your Web site. To do that, visit Backtweets and type in your site’s address. Aside from your own tweets, you should try to get at least one tweet sending people your way.
• Favorites: If you are an expert dispensing advice on Twitter, you want to make sure that people find your tips useful. To see if people are saving your tweets as favorites, visit http://favotter.matope.com/en, enter your Twitter username and click on the button directly to the right.

Interested in how links connect people, companies and news organizations? Follow Kevin Sablan on Twitter @ksablan.

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