We’re always on the lookout out for great free social media tools around here, and love testing out new ones-especially if they help us do our job better, which is to help clients get better results from their search and social media marketing efforts. One of the ways we do that is through Digital Marketing Audits-for example, our Social Media SWOT Analysis-utilizing a mixture of performance evaluation techniques and technology tools.

I recently discovered TweetBinder, a free tool that analyzes tweets by type and helps you organize them into more meaningful, curated collections it calls “binders” (hence the name!).

After signing in with your Twitter account, simply plug in a search term, hashtag or Twitter username to start analyzing the stream of tweets. TweetBinder will automatically classify the tweets by type, as follows.

Analyze # of Tweets by Type

• Text (plain) tweets
• Tweets containing links
• @replies
• Tweets containing photos
• Check-ins
• Retweets

The tool spits out a couple of handy reports that breaks down the above information, like this:

And of course, a pretty pie chart (you know how we marketers love our pie charts!):

The set of data TweetBinder analyzes for free spans a period of 7 days. If you want to go back further than that, you’ll have to sign up for the beta of the premium tool, which is under development.

Still, this type of quick analysis is very useful for quickly classifying a large volume of tweets, especially if they center around a hot, trending topic or hashtag. You could also use this tool to compare the breakdowns of tweet types among competitors to gain a little more insight into their social media strategy. Not bad for a free tool!