I’ve been rather busy lately moving house, hence the lack of posts and even a reduction in my Twitter activity. To get back in the swing of things a quick post about TweetReach.
Stephen Waddington highlighted this tool to me at the North East CIPR Awards on Friday (congrats to all the winners by the way). It is pretty straightforward to use. Put in a term, a url or hashtag and it calculates the following three measures:
Reach – the number of different people who follow people who have talked about the search in some way.
Exposure – how many times someone could have seen a particular reference to the topic e.g. if 4 people have tweeted it who all have a follower in common then that follower will have been exposed to it 4 times but will only count as 1 in the reach figures.
Impressions – the total number of occasions to see (effectively the sum of the “Exposure” figures for everyone “Reach”ed)
Note that the Reach figure measures the number of different people. Assuming this is the case (and I have no practical way of checking this) then this is good stuff as it ensures that duplication in networks is taken care of. It also tells you what proportion of the relevant tweets were retweets or @replies.
So a very good tool in theory for understanding the extent and likely penetration of a conversation. However unfortunately the bad news is that it is limited to the last 50 tweets, unless you pay TweetReach $20 and even then it is limited by Twitter’s API to the last seven days or 1,500 tweets. The seven day limitation also means that you MUST carry out the analysis close to the time of the relevant conversation as you can’t go back historically. These factors weaken its role as a measurement tool significantly unfortunately IMHO.
Perhaps now that Google are indexing our tweets the tool could be expanded?