There are several basic ways marketers can start measuring Twitter campaign effectiveness. These simple terms map new social media techniques to traditional media metrics.
Measuring Twitter Broadcast Reach and Frequency
For raw broadcast reach, your number of Followers is the leading indicator because it quantifies your baseline Twitter audience. Your Updates quantify baseline frequency. Retweets act as reach and frequency multipliers by rebroadcasting your message beyond your own direct followers. (Check out How to Retweet: A Simple Guide.) As your target audience grows, so does your opportunity for meaningful engagement.
Measuring Twitter Engagement
Many Twitterers automatically reciprocate new followers. Therefore, a >1 ratio of Followers to Followees tends to indicate organic engagement rather than a culture of reciprocity. @Replies, Twitter’s public conversation feature, is the most significant engagement quantifier because your audience is responding to your message.
Twitter Scoring Tools
Third party tools like twitterholic ranks Twitterers based on location, their followers, the people they follow and the number of updates. While InRev TwitIn goes a bit further by scoring efficiency, retweets and influence.
Google Analytics
First off, if you don’t have Google Analytics set-up for your website, you are making a big mistake and missing allot of rich marketing insight. (Send me a note and maybe we can help you.) Use the the reports to see how much of your traffic is coming from Twitter. What are they looking at? What is working? What is not?
All these free simple tools work together and paint a picture of campaign effectiveness. For advanced measurement as campaigns mature, there is no shortage of more robust and expensive semantic tools. Tell us what you think. What works? What’s hard?
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Zabada, Inc.
Andy Sernovitz
CopyBlogger
Gary Vaynerchuk
ProBlogger
May 12th, 2009 at 7:14 pm
thank you for posting this. i am really interested in this type of marketing, and am currently trying to wade my way through. i really appreciate your service!
thanks again,
marsha
July 16th, 2009 at 12:22 pm
As a community manager, I find tools like Twinfluence (although glitchy) and Twitter Analyzer (getting better and better) to be incredibly helpful in measuring my Twitter account’s effectiveness and keeping an eye on trends.
October 12th, 2009 at 12:07 pm
I just found a great squidoo article on twitter advertising i hope you all find interesting, http://www.squidoo.com/twitter-marketing-secrets
November 4th, 2009 at 12:41 pm
I think id like to review this tool, you should contact me on my site.
February 3rd, 2010 at 6:55 am
Hi thank you for an perceptive post, I actually found your blog by mistake while searching on Goole for something else nearly related, in any case before i ramble on too much i would just like to state how much I enjoyed your post, I have bookmarked your site and also taken your RSS feed, Once Again thank you very much for the blog post keep up the good work.
February 3rd, 2010 at 9:37 am
Glad this is helpful. We’ll keep it going. Thanks for comments.
March 17th, 2010 at 12:47 pm
Twitter is one of the fastest growing websites nowadays. Different types of people simply love this website, because it serves as a good way for them to communicate with other people from different parts of the world. That’s why people today are now taking advantage of Twitter by promoting their products or to advertise their businesses. You can even use Twitter to promote your web page or site in order for you to acquire targeted traffic flowing into your website and start making some money.
April 12th, 2010 at 6:46 am
Nice article, as always, Mark!
@Sandra Thanks for the two additional suggestions. Just checked out Twitter Analyzer and Twinfluence and they look very promising.
June 21st, 2011 at 8:15 am
It would seem that the primary goal of business marketing is to move product out the door and not necessarily just have potential customers talking about you. Whereas it could be expected that anyone who knows of your product or service will be more likely to purchase said good or service (or at least consider doing so), it does not follow they necessarily will. This is the issue in attempting measure the effectiveness of businesses’ Tweeter or Facebook presence in that it is extremely difficult, if not down right impossible, to correlate x number of tweets with x number of products being shipped. InRev acknowledges this and questions (maybe without knowing it) the effectiveness of social media stating “Evidently, the large population brings in potential customers for your businesses”. So that while it is “evidently” true that social marketing produces potential customers, it is actual customers that pay the bills.