Have you ever seen a big spike in Twitter followers – or a big drop (unrelated to Twitter maintenance) – and wondered what happened? Wondered how you could emulate it again, or make sure it never happens in the future? Well TweetEffect may be the tool to help you figure it out.

There are a myriad of Twitter applications that let you analyze your followers – who is or isn’t following you, whose account is inactive for a period of time, etc. But TweetEffect is different. It shows you what tweets resulted in a change in your followers. Simply enter your twitter name and they analyze your 200 latest updates and flag those that made people follow or leave you.

It could be a fluke, and if you’re only seeing a swing of one or two followers, your tweets may not be impacting your following positively or negatively. But it is an interesting indicator and could signify that you need to take action:

If you are losing followers …

• Take a look at the tweets that cause a significant drop in followers. Check for a change in voice, topic, or offensive tweet, and consider editing out those tweets in the future.
• If nothing stands out, look at the few tweets before that time and analyze them too.
• Consider adding a second account if you find that you are losing followers but want to continue using a new voice/topic.
• Consider warning your followers if you are going to be participating in a chat or discussion that will clog up their stream.

If you are gaining followers …

• Take a look at the tweets that cause a significant gain in followers. Consider adding more tweets in that same vein – whether it’s a new topic of interest, a new hastag you’re involved in, or a new voice you’re implementing.
• If your tweets aren’t out of the norm, consider other ways that followers may have found you. Are you running a contest that involves Twitter? Were you involved in a #followfriday or did another user push followers your way? Make sure to thank them and continue supporting others on Twitter!

Nikki Katz is the Managing Editor for the BlogWorld Blog. Feel free to follow her Twitter @nikki_blogworld and @katzni