When Twitter was first established, it seemed like a fairly simple concept. You could post 140 characters relating to whatever you wanted and if people liked what you had to say they'd follow you. However, as Twitter evolved, thousands and thousands of different applications were developed piggy backing off of its success. Simply put, Twitter isn't just Twitter anymore. You have TweetDeck to monitor multiple accounts, Tweet Beep for e-mail notifications, Twitterberry for your Blackberry, HootSuite for your analytics tracking, TwitterButtons for your website, Social Oomph for the lazy tweeters who want to schedule updates for a certain date, bit.ly to shorten your URLs, not to mention thousands and thousands more. If you have about a week to spare you can view even more here: http://www.squidoo.com/twitterapps
These applications / tools can be great time savers and enhance your overall Twitter experience...if utilized properly. People (and businesses) often make the mistake of signing up for as many Twitter applications as possible until they experience Twitter overload. The key is narrowing down a select few tools that will help your "Twitter productivity". When doing this remember to....
Assess what your end goals are:
Are you using Twitter to drive sales, increase brand awareness, as a customer service tool? All applications that you utilize should have something to do with your marketing objectives. Simply using an application because it's "cool" isn't effective from a productivity standpoint. Why use social oomph, a tool that allows you to schedule tweets later, if you're trying to make your account customer service oriented?
See where there is overlapping:
All applications are different in some capacity, but there is also a lot overlapping in terms of features. A lot of people use TweetDeck as a way to organize who they are following by category type. Did you know you can do this now directly on Twitter.com through Twitter lists (picture shown on the left)? Analyze why you are using a particular Twitter application and get rid of any clutter.
Analyze what metrics you are measuring:
I personally believe that you can't just measure your total number of followers when determining the success of your Twitter account. I'd rather have 1,000 followers who actually pay attention to what I have to say then 10,000 followers who never have seen an update I've implemented (it's scary how many people actually disagree with this). When I analyze my overall Twitter success I take in an account various metrics (which I'll explain in a few), but not everybody views this as essential. If your boss wants you to test Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn and report to him in a couple of months about which is driving the most sales, you can simply do this by looking at your e-commerce stats within your Google Analytics (or whatever your analytics program of choice is). No need to analyze bit.ly clicks, brand mentions via tweetbeep, or Mr. Tweet's growth stats if at the end of the day your boss is just looking at sales figures.
I'm going to digress a bit (probably should save this for another post, but oh well) and discuss what I generally use to measure Twitter success. This does vary depending on the type of Twitter account, but for the most part these represent how I determine if what I'm tweeting is having an impact.
Twitter Traffic: This isn't as simplistic as it sounds. You have 1,000 visits from Twitter this month...so what? What impact did that truly have on your business? Don't get me wrong, the amount of unique visitors is very important and should be analyzed, but there should be other metrics involved. How long are these visitors staying on your website? What's the bounce rate? Did they purchase anything / fill out a form? As corny as it sounds, it's not just about the quantity of traffic, but also about the quality of traffic.
Retweets /Replies: Retweets and replies to your updates signify that people are actually engaged with your account / brand. I like to also assess the context of each retweet / reply as well. If I get a "Follow Friday" and notice that the user recommended everybody and their mother's Twitter account, I do not view this as having any impact on my brand whatsoever. I weed out these "no impact" replies and analyze whether the number of quality retweets / replies have increased over time. This, to me, is an effective way of analyzing brand engagement as it relates to Twitter.
Leads / Sales: I am one of those people who believe that you can never fully track ROI through Social Media. Social Media is about building relationships...which cannot be tracked from an ROI perspective. However, it is still important to analyze this data. If you noticed that Twitter has been driving $200 in sales daily and then on Friday produced $2,000, it is essential to analyze your Twitterstream to see what you could have tweeted that day to cause this unusual spike. Sometimes the spike is directly correlated with a more influential tweeter posting about your company. Even though I believe you can't make this statistic the lone determent of Social Media success, it is still imperative to analyze this data regularly.
Brand Mentions via Twitter Search: I'll search for Prime Visibility (or whatever brand I'm monitoring) through Twitter's search engine as a way to see how many people on Twitter are currently discussing my brand. It is important to note that if you are tweeting more often, there will be more search results.
Bit.ly Clicks: I'll often post links to other resources that provide some industry insight. Since I obviously don't have access to their analytics, I'll check my bit.ly stats to see how many people have clicked on my link. An argument here might be that other people are distributing the same bit.ly link as well. How I combat this is by creating a custom tracking code at the end of the URL (see screenshot below). This will create an individual bit.ly link for the URL I'm disbributing.
Followers: Nothing is more of an ego booster than waking up the next day to see 500 or so new followers. Who are these people though? Having 500 spammers as new followers is the equivalent of having ZERO new followers. As the number of my followers grow, I look for growth in the aforementioned areas as well:
- Traffic from Twitter
- Retweets / Replies
- Sales / Leads from Twitter
- Increase in brand mentions (via Twitter's search feature).
- Bit.ly clicks
Deciding the most what are the most important metrics and applications is a matter of opinion (and often requires a lot of testing). Once you narrow down what's important you'll be able to increase your overall Twitter productivity and accurately assess the results of your Twitter campaign.
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