If you know how to use Twitter well, you can have some amazing success by networking you or your business on Twitter. And you can also do some serious damage to poor customer driven companies by using it to complain about things. But most people don’t really understand the benefits of Twitter because it’s hard to track results from it. But why is it so hard to track your results and success from Twitter?

Basically, unless your web visitor is clicking your Twitter link from the Twitter.com website, it won’t show up as a direct Twitter referrer in your analytics (it will simply appear as direct/bookmark traffic). Therefore if the user is visiting from a desktop application like TweetDeck, or a mobile phone app like TwitterFon, it will come in wrongly as direct/bookmark traffic instead. And unfortunately a pretty high proportion of all Twitter traffic comes from mobile or regular Twitter apps, and not from the Twitter.com website.

Luckily there are several great ways to track your success better and address some of these tracking issues. So, lets take a look at some great ways to track and measure your success (or current failure) on Twitter…

- Use Tracking Codes! Put tracking codes in the URLs that you use in Twitter. This is fairly easy if you use Google Analytics campaign builder- yes, I know its a pain to do so, but trust me, it will help you see the true impact of your Twitter usage, including its impact on your site goals like sales or signups. And to make it even easier, you can use this great Google Analytics Twitter hack to take out the annoying manual part of doing this.

- Use a better URL shortener! Instead of using the default Twitter URL shortener, you can use a better one like bit.ly or ow.ly – these include built in tracking codes so you can monitor clicks, and who is Twittering about the URL that you put in your link. And they show up in your analytics as their own referrer (instead of as direct traffic), no matter whether the clicker uses a Twitter application, or Twitter.com, so you can measure your Twitter usage better!

- Measure your influence! There is also a great free tool that actually gives you even better Twitter analysis – its called Twitalyzer, and lets you measure your influence, not just measuring clicks. It uses a system to calculate things like your reach, genorousity and clout in the would of Twitter. Definitely worth a look!

See the full article at RichPage.com