Twitter’s importance lies in the fact that I have found it to be the one marketing channel that can drive the most engagement into other channels. While it can be time consuming and elusive in the way that it works, calculating a few key metrics can significantly increase the effectiveness of your Twitter campaigns. Calculate these 5 simple measures and you will start getting more from your campaigns while still staying within your marketing budget and maximizing your ROI.
Twitter Is Important
Twitter’s ability to deliver and scale a brand’s message to the right people at the right time is unmatched by any other form of marketing. While other marketing channels such as email, Facebook, and search can deliver a great deal of immediate and long-term value to a brand, these channels lack the real-time velocity of Twitter and can remain stagnant without linking them to ongoing conversations that maintain their relevancy. Monitoring and identifying these conversations as they’re happening in Twitter can take a tremendous amount of resources and, as a result, eat away at the budgets of novice and experienced marketers alike.
However, applying a few quick calculations to your overall Twitter marketing strategy can help you drive down your costs and earn more value from your efforts. To get the most out of your investment of time and financial resources, we suggest that you calculate these five measures of engagement of your Twitter marketing. Due to the real time and dynamic nature of Twitter, we suggest that you do this on a rolling 14 day average.
Once these five factors have been calculated, you can determine whether your campaigns are generating enough engagement to help you reach your defined goals. Let’s get into the underlying metrics a bit more.
1. Total Engagement
Total engagement is defined in Twitter as the total interactive performance that your Twitter activity generates. In other words, how much does your audience interact with your tweets? Engagement is the single most important metric driver of conversion activity and the hardest to maintain. As a marketer, you need to target the most influential and relevant activity to both interact with and to curate. Knowing how you’re doing will ultimately determine how effective your marketing campaigns are and whether they are generating the desired outcomes you’re after.
Calculation Methodology:
The Total Engagement score will be a weighted average of four component metrics. Terametric has its own method of weighting metrics based on its historical analysis within the application but marketers can assign their own weights as well.
2. New Followers Per Day
Calculating the follower growth rate is an indicator of how well you’re consistently attracting and maintaining prospective customers. Followers fluctuate on a daily basis but generally should be trending upwards. Determining a healthy growth rate should be based on establishing benchmarks to compare yourself against. What is good growth for you vs. President Obama are two very different things. Understanding the difference means you’ll spend your time more efficiently. Attracting the right followers is the next determinant.
Calculation Methodology:
Follower growth should be a weekly rate also calculated using 14 days’ worth of data.
3. Follower Influence
Having a large number of followers is important. Having the right followers, the kind that actually care about your brand, product and industry is much better. Calculating influence can be done using general purpose platforms like Klout but measuring influence based on peers and relevance – and relative to your competitors – is better.
Calculation Methodology:
Regardless of what influence measure you choose, Klout, Peer Index or Terametric, you can take a random sampling of followers on a weekly basis and calculate their score on a rolling 14 day basis. Terametric Optimizer for Twitter tracks active followers and calculates their influence using this methodology based on Terametric’s proprietary influence measurement scoring algorithm.
4. Retweets (RTs)
Retweets are still the best way to determine whether your tweets are resonating with others – a true measure of virality and reach.
Calculation Methodology:
(The total number of retweets during the past 14 days) / (total number of tweets during the last 14 days)
5. Average Tweet Grade
The composition of your tweets is critical to their ability to reach the right audience at the right time. Using shortened urls, trending keywords and hashtags, branded keywords, relevant influencers as well as positive sentiment increase the likelihood that your tweets will generate conversion activity.
Calculation Methodology:
Terametric has a proprietary algorithm that grades a tweet for its ability to convert based on its components and whether a component is trending.
Conclusion
While Twitter can become a very labor- and resource-intensive marketing channel, its growth and reach gives marketers oodles of hidden value on its own as a form of building engagement directly as well as through other marketing channels. Using analytics to drive insight and value into marketing campaigns is an essential part of today’s marketing arsenal. With intelligence and the right tools, marketers can execute targeted Twitter campaigns that deliver the most ‘bang for the buck’ – maximizing the efficiency of marketing resources and driving real, measurable value.
Have you tried any of these measures? Do you have any additional methods to measure engagement you’d like to add? Be sure to share your thoughts below, and don’t hesitate to reach out to me and let me know how I can be helpful to you.
About the Author: Wendy Troupe is the Founder and CEO of Terametric.
Terametric Optimizer for Twitter – Put Big Data to Work
Unlike other analytics and execution packages, Terametric Optimizer for Twitter is an intelligent social media platform that enables marketers to use Twitter more efficiently and effectively. Leveraging the power of big data analysis, marketers can focus on creating campaigns that target the right audience at the right time.
And we are particularly honored and excited that Terametric is featured in Idea #8 – ‘Social Analytics’.
“I believe that one of the most important trends in the market is the increasing participation of consumers/customers on social networks, and the ‘big data’ problem – and opportunity – it is creating for marketers who can effective analyze and act on that data,” says Chris Selland, CMO for social marketing platform Terametric and expert on the Focus network.
“Traditionally, marketers have focused on analyzing data that is theirs – visitors to our Web site, callers to our call center. But social data lives on social networks – outside the walls of the organization…It does not belong to the company, but the ability to analyze and act effectively on it is key,” he says.
This article arose because of a community discussion which took place on the site of our partner Focus.com – we’ve got much more to come in terms of our Focus partnership – watch this space for more news and events over the next few weeks!
Interesting statistics from Duke University Fuqua School of Business and the American Marketing Association (via eMarketer).
The study found that companies are setting aside a greater percentage of their marketing budgets for social media and plan to continue that trend going forward. As of August 2011, marketers were spending an average of 7.1% of their marketing budgets on social media and planned to increase that to 10.1% in the next 12 months. Within five years, marketers expect social media to account for 17.5% of marketing budgets.
So good news – Social Marketing spending continues to increase (although, as the study also suggests, at a slightly reduced rate than previous expectations might have indicated). Interestingly, the study also suggests that CRM-related metrics are becoming relatively more important than financial metrics (including, but not limited to, ROI).
To prove the success of social media outreach and keep up budgets, marketers are looking at different metrics. Between August 2010 and August 2011, “The CMO Survey” found that customer-relationship-based activities became more popular to measure, while financial metrics lost steam.
So what does this mean? We would suggest these results should not be read as an endorsement of dropping financial metrics for Marketers, but rather an acknowledgement that marketing is only a piece of the CRM picture – and that metrics such as Revenue, Retention and Customer Lifetime Value belong at least as much to Sales & Customer Service functions (or more) than they do to Marketing.
In other words, brute-force attempts to achieve ‘marketing ROI’ by taking steps such as, for instance, attempting to attribute revenue directly to marketing programs (social or not) tend to be overly simplistic, not realistic, and ultimately not very useful. Why? Because in most organizations, Marketing does not own – or directly influence – the revenue metric. Rather, Sales does.
Effective marketing programs of course assist and support Sales by providing and qualifying lead flow, but an accurate and useful measure of ‘marketing ROI’ on any type of program or campaign must align with how organizations really work – and with their core CRM strategy.
In other words, the trends called out above are not about abandoning financial metrics so much as refining them. Direct measures of Marketing ROI remain challenging, but realigning measurement so it considers marketing not as a standalone function but as an integrated part of a more holistic CRM infrastructure and strategy – which includes Sales, Customer Service and Marketing – is indeed progress. It indicates a more refined and strategic approach to Social Marketing, which we heartily applaud.
Well it’s an exciting time for us here at Terametric! We’ve just released Optimizer for Twitter! Our CEO, Wendy Troupe, has poured all her knowledge and experience into this amazing product, along with an experienced team of advisors and team members. Chris Selland, our CMO, has been networking with some amazing companies as part of our private beta and now the real fun can begin.
If you have a passion for proving ROI like we do then click here to see the PR.
We’ll be offering a webinar on how to use Optimizer for Twitter, along with a detailed look at the distinguishing features that set our product apart for the others in a week or two, so stay tuned!!
If you have any questions, please feel free to contact Chris Selland directly. If you would like to request a 30 day free trial, sign up here.
@KimberlyACole
@Terametric
Welcome to Friday, September 2, 2011, edition of “Top Stories in Social Media ROI.” This is Terametric’s series where we keep you updated on the critical evolution of marketing Return on Investment in the Social Media Channel. Our top stories for today feature analytics, Twitter and measuring ROI:
Why Twitter can provide a better ROI than Facebook
According to Compete: Twitter is more effective at driving purchase activity than Facebook. 56% of those who follow a brand on Twitter indicated they are “more likely” to make a purchase of that brand’s products compared to a 47% lift for those who “Like” a brand on Facebook. This is further evidence that marketers can drive ROI with Twitter by engaging followers through compelling content. So for all you marketers who have been ignoring Twitter and going with Facebook because of numbers you maybe missing a great opportunity to increase the ROI of your social media.
33% of B2B Marketers Don’t Measure Marketing ROI [Data]
Eek! Did you read that title? Um…there’s something wrong with this picture. To put it bluntly, if you’re a marketer and you’re not reporting your return on investment to your company’s executives, then you have a problem.
Using Analytics as the Backbone of Social Media Marketing Campaigns, Convertiv Drives Results
Marketers stand at a pivotal point in their understanding of integrated social/mobile marketing strategies. It’s no longer a questions of what and why, but more of how to implement a successful strategy.
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