CIO —

Twitter users commonly "retweet" fellow users' tweets or links. You will see a user set off a retweet by using the word retweet itself, or the abbreviation "RT" in front of the message. A retweet can increase the pervasiveness of your message across Twitter, while attracting new followers who might be captivated enough by the tweet or link that you shared to begin following you.

But while it's hard enough to write a tweet that people find compelling, it's another thing entirely to measure how well it fared in a retweet.

Luckily, the Twitter ecosystem has responded with a few sites and applications that help you measure the success for a retweet. As we'll show you, many of them break easily and have holes, but they are likely to improve in the coming year as developers refine them.

Twitter's Search Tool

Before you go seeking out a third-party retweet application, you can often find how well your tweet did just by searching for it on Twitter's search tool (make sure you check out our overview on Twitter search).

Using the advanced search tool, you can type the link you tweeted into the "this exact phrase box." Since you most likely used a service that shortens URLs for Twitter, use that link rather than the full one.

bit.ly

Many URL shortening services perform basic analytics on links you tweet. For the purposes of this post, I'll focus on bit.ly, since this capability is the most visually appealing and reliable of the lot in my view. (To utilize the Twitter conversations feature in bit.ly, which will allow you to see retweets, you must sign up for the service, which is free).

After you upload a link to bit.ly's site, you can click on "info" to see analytics data for that link, including the amount of clicks it received. Below the "traffic" section, you will find "conversations." There you can see who retweeted the link.

The problem with tracking your retweets on bit.ly is that someone might have retweeted your link using a different URL shortening service. People often want to manage their own tweets on their service of choice. When this happens, you might not see every single retweet that occurred. Nevertheless, in my experience, people normally will just use the URL you provided.

The New Apps

There are a slew of services that make it their business to track retweets, but I didn't find a ton of them to be reliable in a top to bottom way. Retweetist and dailyRT both allow you to search for retweets, but I frequently received error messages or inconclusive results on both sites, which tells me they need work.

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