Twitter offers numerous methods of measuring the popularity and effectiveness of their accounts. Both Twitter and independent websites offer programs and tools allow users to gather and analyze a variety of data, including metrics for individual posts or topics, account growth, traffic and more.
The variety of data available is important. Simply tracking your number of Followers does not provide conclusive information about your audience, and it does not indicate the overall success or failure of your messaging.
We use a number of tools to gather metrics about our Twitter account. Here are a few useful applications:
According to “How to Gather and Use Twitter Metrics” on wikiHow, the tools below perform the following functions:
- The Follower count indicates the number of people you are following and the people who are following you. You can calculate the number of “retweets” – the number of posts that Followers shared with their Followers, and you can create custom links to measure the traffic of specific URLs.
- Twitterholic measures the growth of an account over time. It also compares Twitter accounts based on region, revealing the most popular accounts for a certain geographical area.
- Google Analytics, used for many other websites, also provides a tool for Twitter. This measures the traffic of the account, including the number of visitors per month and visits per follower.
- Twitalyzer is an independent website that measures a Twitter account in five ways: influence, signal-to-noise ratio, generosity, velocity and clout.
Not only can businesses use these tools to measure data about their own account, but the public can use these tools to check the credibility of accounts they follow. Giving the public access to these measurements helps make Twitter a more effective communications tool. It allows the community to identify influential and significant users, detect spammers, and determine the actual popularity of accounts, including their own.
All of these tools will help Twitter gain credibility among businesses, as they can attain a variety of measurable data to measure the success of their accounts.
These instruments also support the notion that Twitter is a valuable social network, and might be more of a permanent marketing staple than many experts initially believed.
Managing the seemingly endless number of social media sites in the era of Web 2.0 may seem like a daunting task, but it can be done. We at IF were recently faced with just such a task. We needed to integrate the ever-growing popularity of social networking into our game plan as an interactive marketing agency, and we needed to understand how these sites could impact our clients. And, like any competent evil scientist, we decided to experiment on ourselves. Muwahahaha! (lightning crash)
First, it was important to identify which sites best serve each purpose. For professional social networking, we chose LinkedIn because it’s user-friendly and is building a reputation for professionalism. In fact, a group of job seekers in Orange County, California have formed a regional job search group on LinkedIn called “Linked Orange County California” and is now among the nation’s top regional job search groups. While LinkedIn is the most popular of the professional breed of social networking, sites like Ning and Plaxo are also worth checking out.
Facebook is probably considered the standard social networking site (sorry Myspace) so of course IF marketing & advertising has a Facebook page. But Facebook is limited in its ability to communicate information to clients and customers. Since we already utilize blogging for our website and many clients’ sites, the next step was to extend our reach as bloggers to popular and easy to use sites such as Wordpress, Blogger and Technorati.
Twitter’s popularity as a micro-blogging site has skyrocketed in the past two months and is the buzz word of 2009. While Twitter is appealing to people who want the world to know what they are doing at any given moment, it is also a useful tool to develop and maintain new professional contacts and relationships with companies and people all over the world. Since it’s fairly new, the effects Twitter can have on business remain unclear, but research has shown that time invested in Twitter can result in increased brand awareness and more traffic to your site.
Finally, sites such as YouTube, Digg and StumbleUpon are focused on sharing content rather than building social networks and relationships, and the content on these sites can be highly entertaining, informative and well worth sharing.
Of course, these are not the only social networking sites out there, far from it. But these are the most popular right now, and we decided not to dive in head first, but instead dip our toes. However, we have taken precautions against social media cyber squatting, and you probably should too. Check out www.knowem.com and find out the availability of your name, or better yet, contact us and let IF marketing & advertising help you get started today.
