I expect a few raised eyebrows from the title of this post, but first off understand that what I’m asking is could you, not would you.

While there is a growing market for paid and sponsored tweets one thing’s for sure – You can’t sell much of anything unless it has value. What I would like to suggest is that one of the ways you make Twitter a more useful tool is to focus on making your Twitter activity and tweets more valuable.

Value is one of those hard to pin down terms, and even more so with a tool like Twitter, but services that offer paid tweeting programs can actually help you understand your Twitter value baseline. If you want to find out how much your tweets are worth today, go to Sponsored Tweets and sign up for an account.

I’m not advocating that you actually participate in the program, unless that serves your objectives, but during the sign-up process the service will suggest what you should charge for your tweets based on your current Twitter account – effectively giving some measure of value.

If your goal is to find ways to increase the value and influence of your Twitter participation I would suggest making a trip to several Twitter analytics tools to gain some real insight into your Twitter influence. Each of the services below has different ways of measuring and I like something about all of them. The goal in using these tools, however, should stretch beyond simply measuring and move squarely into strategically increasing the value of your participation on Twitter.

Klout – currently the most talked about tool and probably presents the simplest and most trusted measure of influence, a Klout score. The score is based on – True Reach, the size of your engaged audience. Amplification Score, the likelihood that your messages will generate actions. Network score, how influential your engaged audience. It’s worth noting that this is not about the pure size, it’s about what your followers do and who they are.

Twitalyzer – this tool is one of my favorites because there is so much data to play with. You can really get a sense of what impact you and your tweets have through a map of about 20 metrics, including your Klout score. (Here’s an explanation of the terms and metrics on Twitalyzer)

Tweet Reach – this is the simplest of tools and not as useful for me, but they do provide a very useful feature. Tweet Reach makes is very easy for me to view the followers that are contributing the most impressions to my tweets and that’s useful knowledge for future engagement.

In all cases, these tools allow you to get a measure of where you are having impact, but also identify the current users that have influence and that are influencing your scores. I think this is essential because it allows you to see where you could get more impact by creating lists and groups of influencers and engaging them more frequently, even if only through retweeting their content.

These tools, particularly Twitalyzer, make it easy to find people of influence to follow and engage. Remember as you go out and start digging in to these tools as a way to make your Twitter experience more valuable – Engagement and influence is more than follower numbers.

I know there’s still lots of sentiment towards simply being authentic, engaging genuinely and sharing content organically, and while I don’t argue with that, why not bring a little science to the mix to make your work pay off even faster.