Last week, Darrell Etherington wrote about how hard it is to measure the value of Twitter. One way to measure the impact that you’re having on the Twitter-sphere would be to see how many people link to your service, product or blog. Unfortunately, due to Twitter’s 140-character limit, most URLs are shortened using a service like TinyURL, is.gd or bit.ly, so if you search for a URL using Twitter Search, you’ll miss out on many of the links. This is where new service BackTweets can help. It works similarly to the standard Twitter Search — including Ajax notification of new results, so you can track mentions of your product or service in real-time — but, crucially, it dereferences shortened URLs so you won’t miss out on any mentions of your URL.
As an example, let’s try searching for “http://webworkerdaily.com” on Twitter Search and BackTweets. Twitter Search produces a rather paltry single page of results, with only one tweet from the last day.

Twitter Search for "http://webworkerdaily.com"
BackTweets, on the other hand, returns many more results, with two pages of tweets from the last day alone. It’s a much better tool for tracking mentions of a site on Twitter.

BackTweets search for "http://webworkerdaily.com"
What tools do you use for measuring impact in social media?
(via Daring Fireball)
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