Heavy Twitter Users Bring Social Activity to New Heights
eMarketer estimates there are 26 million monthly users of Twitter in 2010. That makes users of the microblogging service a relatively small minority of internet users, at 14.6%, and daily users are naturally even fewer in number. But their voice is disproportionately loud. According to ExactTarget, daily Twitter users are highly active across the social web. They are about three times as likely as internet users on average to upload photos, four times as likely to blog, three times as likely to post ratings and reviews, and nearly six times as likely to upload articles.
Forrester study finds small percentage of adults use foursquare
The study found that only 4% of the adult, Internet-using population has used any kind of location-based service, and just 1% of all adults check into a location at least once a week. By contrast, more than 11% of Online adults have used Twitter, and an estimated 28% of all Internet users have signed up for Facebook. Diving deeper into the demographics of LBS apps, the study found that users are likely to be 19- to 35-year-old, college-educated males who are “influential among their friends and family.”
From: MobileMarketingWatch Posted on 27 July 2010
Measuring Success on Twitter
To properly measure a Twitter campaign, the first step is to understand what the key performance indicators are for that campaign’s goals and objectives. Campaign success depends on the marketing objectives. Is your company using twitter to drive traffic to your site? Is it using twitter to deal with customer support? Are you using twitter to alert people of product promotions and sales? You get the idea. After those KPIs have been properly defined, marketers can select the appropriate tools to gain insight on everything from what users are responding to which links they are being referred from.
In all cases, the best way to identify core metrics is to start by envisioning what success looks like. What are the key things that would happen? List those goals and then worry about how they will be assessed. It’s possible that not all will be measurable, but many of them will be and once the goals have been identified, the next step is to choose reliable tools to measure progress.
Dell has been using the mobile channel for the last two years to alert customers to price promotions of various products. Segmenting the mobile user data from each mobile campaign (e.g., the number of users that participated in the promotion using twitter) is invaluable. This can be tracked by one of two ways.
1. Using a tagged link in order to accurately define inbound traffic
2. Using a promotional code unique to Twitter
Tracking all this inbound traffic promoted through the twitter channel can be a valuable indicator of campaign success.
Tools to Measure Success
Some tools are introspective—they look at how the Twitter campaign is presenting itself or how to organize Twitter information from other sources. Other tools are quantitative—they analyze traffic, trends, and follower count. It’s important to note that all these sites are pulling data off of Twitter itself and are dependent on the tool and its Twitter API (application programming interface—the toolkit that Twitter gives out to developers) for accuracy and relevance. That can affect the value of the metrics campaign, and make it somewhat self-referential at times.
twInfluence helps marketers track not only how many listeners they have (also called reach) but also how concentrated their audience is (centralization) and the rate at which their campaign is growing (velocity), among other metrics.
Twitalyzer is another tool that enables users to measure important facets of social media, including their popularity (influence), signal-to-noise ratio (signal), and how many times they are being cited (clout). Because a major reason to use Twitter is to become a thought leader and propagate messaging, Twitalyzer is particularly valuable.
Twitalyzer also enables users to tie into Google Analytics if they have a Google account. Logging in to Google Analytics through the site enables marketers to collect information on site traffic directed from Twitter and can augment insight on metrics, such as influence, generosity, and signal. That information can help craft a compelling overview of how a Twitter campaign is influencing the digital-marketing channel.
TwitterFriends provides detailed insight on who is interacting with the brand on Twitter, who is responding, and the nature of the brand’s tweets. The user simply logs in with a username and password, and TwitterFriends returns a significant amount of information and visualization tools that include everything from a map indicating where one’s followers are to the average length of a given tweet. It can be particularly useful when in the planning stages of a Twitter campaign, as well as for tracking, once the work is in progress.
Trendistic is a valuable tool that provides a visual interface to understand trends in Twitter. By entering a keyword, marketers can see how the keyword is being referenced in the space over time. Depending on the term and the amount of data available, it is possible to see up to 180 days’ worth of information.
TweetEffect enables the user to find out how people are reacting to posts. After entering the user ID and clicking Search, the marketer is provided with a summary view of changes within the past, as well as the specific adds or losses based on specific tweets. It’s an excellent way to see what is and isn’t resonating with followers.
