Engaging on Twitter with Clicky – Updated 2010-09-08

Clicky, Social Media Analytics, Social Media Monitoring, Social Media Optimization, Twitter Monitoring Tools, Twitter Text Mining, Viralheat

Jul 292009

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Update 2010-09-08:

Clicky has a new gizmo that I have totally adopted – ClickyChrome. I haven’t made a big secret of how much I like Chromium, the open source branch of Google Chrome. But ClickyChrome just makes it all so much more worthwhile. You install the extension, fill in a control option panel, and then you get:

A badge in the upper left corner of your browser that shows either visitors currently on line, total visitors or goals completed, and
An optional popup that notifies you when someone completes a goal.

So, if you’re a Clicky user, install Chrome or Chromium if you haven’t already, and head over to http://meb.tw/9yWWRL. I’ll be watching for you.

If you visit my web sites, you’ll know that I use Clicky to do my web analytics, and that I have placed Clicky affiliate links on all of them. In the past few weeks, a number of people have asked me why I use Clicky instead of the “free” tools, and how I use it.

Why Clicky, as opposed to the free tools? Well, when people talk about free tools, they’re usually talking about either raw server visitor logs, which need to be post-processed, or Google Analytics. Google Analytics is certainly popular and comprehensive, but I’ve found it extremely difficult to set up and manage. I’ve only managed to get Google Analytics set up on one of my sites, and I found the reports and dashboards incomprehensible.

Clicky, on the other hand, took me about five minutes per site to set up. The most time-consuming part of the operation is installing and configuring the plugins for Drupal and WordPress, the two content management systems I use. That took me about two minutes per site. And then, it just works, and the reports and dashboards are intuitive, easy to read, and easy to configure!

The second key feature of Clicky is real-time analytics. All of the statistics, visualizations, dashboards, goals, campaigns and so on are updated in real time. And there is a Spy capability. With Spy, you can watch visitors as they move around on your web site! I’m watching them as I type this blog post, and as you’ll find out below, I watch them when I am actively engaging on Twitter.

Which brings up the third key feature of Clicky — integrated Twitter search monitoring. You can define Twitter search criteria, and Clicky will monitor the search continuously. The Twitter search monitoring dashboard has the following panels:

Tweet rate graph
Tweet types
@Senders
@Recipients
Links
Hashtags
Tweets

I’m not going to spend much time talking about most of the panels, but the “Tweets” panel is fully interactive — it can function as a Twitter client. If you click on the “@Sender” of a tweet, a browser window opens up on that time line. You can click on any active elements in the tweet, and a browser window will open up on the link. And to the right of each tweet, there is a “Reply” and a “Retweet” button.

So how do I use Clicky? First of all, like any other web analytics tool, I define my goals, campaigns and funnels. But I also define a Twitter search monitoring criterion. For example, to monitor reaction to this blog post, I defined a Twitter search for “Clicky”.

Once all of the setup is done, I open up two tabs in Clicky. The first tab is the Spy tab, which lets me watch visitors to the site. And the second is the Twitter search monitoring tab for the search monitoring criterion. Then I post a tweet, for example, a link to this blog post. Once the dialog begins, I can interact with people on Twitter, watch visitors on my web site, and even change things while I’m watching. Essentially I have real-time A/B testing and engagement on Twitter!

So there you have it — Clicky in a nutshell. I think it’s a perfect example of how Twitter can facilitate engagement on the Internet, and why one would want real-time tools, even for a small-scale web presence like mine. Please feel free to comment here, or on Twitter.