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In our last blog post, we outlined some basic ways users can maximize their reach and influence using Twitter. However, in addition to following industry experts, engaging in conversation, using eCrowds' automatic Twitter tweet functionality, and tweeting content of value to your constituents, analyzing growth in your Twitter clout is equally as important.

Below we've outlined several important key performance indicators to measure and several services that you can use along with your eCrowds efforts to further maximize your social influence.

1. Track growth in your followers and evaluate key ratios - for example, if your following grows substantially as you follow more people, you may already be tweeting content effectively and just need to maximize visibility.
2. Track the number of times your business name, product name, and brand-unique hashtags are used. A good service to track hashtag and brand presence is http://www.tweetvolume.com/
3. Use end-user friendly Twitter analytics services, such as TwitterAnalyzer, which allows you to track volume of tweets, readers reached, and retweets.
4. Use a service to track how often links in your Twitter tweets are clicked. For example, we like StumbleUpon's Su.pr. There are a variety of options out here, here's a great blog post exploring some of them.
5. Keep track of lost followers and when you lose them. To do so, you can simply follow http://www.twitter.com/tless and you will receive a weekly update with lost follower statistics.

Twitter has admittedly taken the social networking world by storm. Parents, celebrities, vendors, and consumers alike are using Twitter to stay in touch via the site's quick microblogging functionality. So how can your organization leverage Twitter's obvious power and influence to your advantage?

As a business, you likely provide a good or service to your market. While product and service updates are an important part of keeping constituents and prospects informed, they are not enough. So, in addition to the automatic Twitter tweet functionality provided with the eCrowds system, we've enumerated several ways in which you can add to your existing Twitter presence to further engage your audience:

1. Follow interesting people that are relevant to your industry - not only does this add visibility by having an additional presence in someone's "followers" list, but it also keeps you informed on trends and breaking news in your industry.
2. Have conversations with these interesting people - back and forth interaction had with someone like @jowyang, for example, makes your name visible to his thousands of followers, and at the same time, you are able to gain valuable insight from an industry professional.
3. Tweet information that you think your followers will find interesting or valuable. Chances are if you find it compelling, they will too, and here's yet another opportunity for added visibility if/when they retweet you.
4. Retweet (RT) tidbits of information from those you follow that would benefit your own followers. This ties into the point above-- if you find it interesting, they probably will too.
   
5. Keep tweets as concise as possible - you may think the 140 character limit is concise enough, but if you don't allow character room to be retweeted, your content loses the potential for viewing by anyone other than those already following you. Allow enough room for "RT @yourtwitternamehere" before your content to avoid this issue.
   

This is just the start to a potentially infinite list. Choosing to adopt some of the practices above will allow you to better engage your Twitter audience and will result in more followers and added visibility. Leave us comments to let us know how it goes! Or better yet, contact us on Twitter!

Because we're currently offering eCrowds completely free of charge as part of our beta soft-launch, it is our goal to elicit as much user feedback as possible during this critical phase of shaping the product. There are an endless number of ways our SaaS content, community, and SEO management system can be used by B2B organizations. Many are powering their corporate intranets, success communities, and websites with the eCrowds system. While the uses are broad, there are specific features included in eCrowds that make it the ideal system for managing a corporate community subsite.

We're looking for insight into what you see as the biggest benefit from using eCrowds thus far. Let us know what eCrowds features you use most, what you like and what you don't. We'll be sure to take all of your feedback into account when making future developments to the product.

Please take just a few short minutes of your time and let us know what your organization is accomplishing with eCrowds and what you'd like to accomplish in the future by giving us feedback on eCrowds.

We've read several blogs recently attempting to address the future of Social CMS.  A common theme among them is the thought-provoking question of whether or not CMS vendors will respond to the surge in social networking by "bolting on" social features to existing enterprise CMS products or offer community platforms with CMS features. And, what will be the deciding factor?

As makers of eCrowds, a SaaS content management and community application, we find these questions to be particularly interesting.  eCrowds was initially developed as more of a white-label social networking platform and over time, with help from our users, we realized our product had more to offer as a content management system that incorporated community elements.

However, eCrowds is a product that cannot necessarily be pigeon-holed as one or the other. While many vendors offer products that fit nicely into either the CMS category or the white-label community management category, eCrowds stands out as one that offers the best of both worlds -- the ability to easily create a fully functional website while incorporating community features such as forums, comments, and rating functionality.

And, the deciding factor for which direction vendors will take? As with most trends, the consumers will lead the way and the vendors will follow suit to develop a product that fits user desires. This is something we already have experience with at eCrowds.  We are a company that listens to our users and truly embodies the spirit of community collaboration, and we are interested to see where you will lead us.