I have been doing a ton of research for the new book from Wiley Publishing, Twitter Marketing for Dummies. The research has to do with productivity tools, marketing tools, and overall marketing knowledge for use on Twitter. I came across TwitterCounter in my search for a tool that fully utilizes trends of your followers, as well as, a personalized platform to track Twitter growth. TwitterCounter doesn’t look like much at first glance but if you dig into the roots of the tool you will find that the guts of the website is fairly useful in terms of analyzing Twitter. 
When you first go to the site it gives you the ability to sign in with your Twitter account and gain access to a variety of data that I found extremely useful.
1. Tracking Your Growth. The site allows you to view a graph that can expand over a couple of days or a couple of months that shows the growth of your followers. This is interesting because it shows you where you being effective and where you were not being effective pertaining to growing your following. If you can see the graph to the right it shows that I had a couple of days last week where my follower count shot up and then it started leveling off at the end of the week. This shows that halfway through the week I was sharing content that people found more valuable than at the end. You can then review your tweets and figure out what content your followers enjoy most.
2. Comparing Your Growth with Other Users. Under the graph you will find a section that allows you to compare different Twitter accounts with your own growth. This allows you to either track your growth compared to competitors in your industry or anything else you could possibly think of when trending growth patterns. It is similar to Compete.com and the use of comparing website traffic with multiple sites. You can then cross reference the data with the accounts you are comparing and find what type of content they are sharing to drive more growth.
3. Twitter Badge for Your Blog. I have always wanted a little badge on my blog that tracks how many followers I have. TwitterCounter gives you the ability to pull an embedded code off their website and place it on your own site. You can see mine to the right of this post under the email subscribe button. This badge gives you another route to gain more followers (especially the people who read your blog and are not following you on Twitter).
4. Twitter and TwitterCounter API. For the geeks reading this post the TwitterCounter API is a pretty cool application to develop. The TwitterCounter API allows you to retrieve everything TwitterCounter knows about a certain Twitter username. It uses a simple REST API, which can be called on at the following UR. Personally, I would not be using the Twitter API but it gives TwitterCounter another route to fully utilizing and searching Twitter for different types of data.
5. Tracking Updates and ReTweets. You have the abiliy to view a graph on the amount of updates you have made in a given day or month and the amount of retweets tracking throughout a given period. This is valuable in order to keep yourself accountable to pushing a certain amount of updates in a given day on Twitter. If you found you have been slacking during a certain time in the week it might be wise to adjust your schedule to help with making more updates to your Twitter account. However, don’t share stupid content. 
6. Remote Twitter Stats. This function is apparently still in building phase but the potential of the tool is pretty cool. The remote allows you to view WHO visited your site from Twitter. This is an awesome application in concept because it will allow you to target the Twitter users that visit your blog on a daily or weekly basis. I don’t know about you but I would love to know which users truly visited my blog. You can start adapting a help me, help you process to your Twitter usage and really push content that specific Twitter users have found appealing.
Did I miss anything on the use of TwitterCounter? Any other avenues that YOU personally use to track your growth using this awesome tool?
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I've taken a laissez-faire attitude for Twitter growth. I keep growing, people keep being interested and my engagement hasn't stopped. Thus far I've been enjoying the results. Definitely use Twitter Counter from time to time just to check it out though.
Sounds like a great tool, thanks for sharing these tips! There are so many options for analytics and it's hard to find the best ones, so I definitely appreciate learning about the ones people have actually found useful.
Bravo! Thanks for this info. I will RT.