One week ago today: the birth of Twitalytics

It's hard to believe that only a week has passed since the launch of Twitalytics. So much has been accomplished and learned in so short a period of time. Let's review. Since Saturday, Aug 24 2008 we have tweeted 230 times or about 33 times a day if you're doing the math beating the original expectation of tweeting at least once an hour. A more important metric is that each tweet had to surpass a certain level of "information-richness." In other words, we can't just tweet anything. It has to communicate something of value to the Twitter audience. It must add to the dialogue, not to the cacophony. (ooh, that's good ... have to use that line again).

We have also blogged seven times and this post will be number eight. An average of one a day ... our desired goal.

Another important metric to us is the number of people who follow us and the ratio of people who followed us organically vs the number of people who follow us simply because we followed them first. Roughly 15% of our current list of 97 followers found us organically.

On the blog, we've tried a number of different experiments to see what seems to work. Our most recent post of 25 little known facts about Sarah Palin has performed best so far. That's a format we're likely to repeat again.

SEO. A search for 'twitalytics' on Google now returns about 130 pages from their index that match on the word. Of those all but one are hits referring to something we tweeted or blogged. From a marketing and branding perspective, it is important that we completely own the word. So far we do.

What hasn't worked? We went out of the gate following 2000 people with nothing to show. Very few tweets, no blog, no bio. In hindsight, that was a huge mistake. When someone gets a "follow" notice, they are likely to check out who is following them before they return the follow. If you have nothing to show, you are not likely to get followed. We are now refollowing a small handful to see if the follow rate increases now that we have much more to show for our efforts.

Congratulations Twitalytics on a great first week. Keep up the momentum!!