Social media marketers spend their days endeavoring to win lots of new friends and influence people in the digital universe. Twitter, the micro-blogging platform that has transformed global communication, is now a vital part of any marketing strategy, especially for small businesses. And more than any other social media platform, Twitter use is analyzed to death. There are now so many tools and widgets to measure the Return on Investment of your account, it boggles the mind. Twitter tracking tools and the women who love them! Why are marketers so obsessed with Twitter metrics and their Klout influence scores? There is much at stake. A successful marketing strategy depends on targeting the appropriate niche market, and engaging the influencers and brand advocates. Analyzing the right Twitter metrics and implementing corrective measures to improve your reach can make all the difference in the world.
Although the quality of your followers is ultimately more important than the quantity, you have a better chance of engaging influencers and thought leaders if you, at first, cast a wide net. Moreover, steady growth is a sign of a healthy Twitter account. How do you track the numbers of your followers? Twitter does most of the work for you. The micro-blogging platform automatically keeps tabs on the number of your followers and the numbers of people you follow, as well. To dig deeper into your growth over time, TwitterCounter provides a useful historical analysis of the number of your followers. The tool also takes a look at your growth pattern and hazards a guess, as to when your followers would double in number. Would you like to know where in the world your followers are? Tweriod mines your followers’ time zones from their bios, placing the information in a handy graph.
So, you know how many folks are plugged into your Twitter account and you even know when they are sleeping. But what interests do they have? If your efforts to engage your Twitter followers have fallen flat, maybe they just aren’t that into you. Attempting to engage a bunch of retired folks to patronize your college-town bar, that serves ten-cent wings and watered down pitchers of Bud Light, is an exercise in futility. TwitterSheep analyzes the stated interests of your Twitter followers by collecting the keywords in their bios and placing them in a handy word cloud. In one glance, you can determine if your followers fall in the right niche.
According to an anonymous quote, “Influence may be the highest level of human skills.” How can you measure whether your Twitter marketing efforts are influencing others to act? There’s an App for that. Actually there are several. But Klout is the most widely used and most buzzed about Twitter tracking tool. Klout, the San Francisco-based startup boasts it’s “The standard for influence.” Klout employs a propriety algorithm that measures your influence across multiple social media channels. You are awarded a score from 1 to 100 that’s largely based on the engagement and reactions of your followers. Retweets, clicks and comments, all weigh heavily in arriving at your score. Klout scores have become so prevalent that companies are targeting individuals with high Klout scores, and offering them special deals and promotions, according to The New York Times. PeerIndex and TwitterGrader provide useful influence scores as well.
How effective is your messaging? Have your Twitter marketing strategies inspired your followers to act? Analyzing the number of retweets and clicks on your links provide you with the information you need to make the most of your Twitter presence. If certain messages are not getting retweeted, you can switch up your content to achieve better results. You can easily track your links using Bit.ly, or Ow.ly, Hootsuite’s URL shortener tool. Retweets and links generate clicks and clicks produce conversions. Hootsuite and TweetDeck are not only superb tools to effectively manage your social media activities across multiple channels; they also track the all-important action metrics, as well.
Ultimately, the only metric that really matters to your bottom line is the number of conversions. Successful Twitter marketing campaigns convert followers into customers. Analyzing your followers, their interests and their habits provide you with the information you need to direct your followers to your website. Tweet it and they will come. But before you can drive your followers to your website, you need to analyze the right Twitter metrics, make the necessary adjustments to your marketing strategy, and lather, rinse and repeat. A new Twitter tracking kid on the block, Twitter Web Analytics, measures how many of your Twitter followers visit your website. It’s still in beta, but it’s scheduled to roll out in the next several weeks.
With 200 million Twitter users and counting, you can’t afford not to strategize and maximize your social media marketing efforts. The key is knowing which metrics are important to your business model.
