GMT is now following 85 Twitter accounts operated by organizations that are members of GMT. Reading your tweets is an opportunity for use to see what you are up. I have noticed that a lot of people are posting links to news articles, press releases or other websites. Coupling strong headlines and links in your tweets is a great way to get your message out. However, most of our members do not use tiny URLs that track click through rates, so they have no way of knowing if people are reading their tweets.

Tracking the click through rates is free and it provides you with a lot of valuable information. You can see exactly which links people are viewing. Is there specific content your followers are more likely to read? Is there a time of the day that gives you the highest click through rate? If you know this information you can give your followers what they want when they want it. This will increase your influence on Twitter.

Most people track this information when they send e-mails. Twitter posts may seem less formal than your e-mail marketing campaign, but if you are going to commit resources to Twitter then you should aim to get the highest return.

We recommend using Hootsuite for posting your tweets. Hootsuite is a free program that allows you to view more than one Twitter account on your dashboard. On your dashboard you can see what the people you follow are saying, review @replies, read direct messages and create search channels to see what people are saying on specific topics. But the reason that we use Hootsuite is that when you use their link shortener (Owl.ly) you will generate links that are trackable. Then you can view statistics on each link. And based on the information you collect revise your tweets to make them more efficient.

Tell us what you think about Hootsuite or tell us which programs you like better.