Archive for the ‘Wendy Troupe's Perspectives’ Category

Social Influence Gains Credence in 2012

Posted in Influence, Social Influence Marketing, Social Media ROI, Wendy Troupe's Perspectives by Wendy Troupe on January 3rd, 2012
 

In recognition of the increasing role online social influence plays in brand affinity and purchasing decisions, we think 2012 will be about engaging with social media and social influencers to further marketing and business goals. It won’t hurt that marketers are looking to gain a deeper understanding of social media marketing and get serious about their overall Social Media Marketing strategy this year either.

Influencers Drive the Interaction

Consumers are communicating more than ever online and making more of their choices based on the opinions of others – as experts, as friends, and as complete strangers. In the same vane for BtoB, industry experts are popping up everywhere outside of the traditional institutions like Gartner or Forrester.

The bottom line? It’s about peers influencing peers and brands engaging with consumers and industry experts on the their terms – wherever and whenever the they choose. This is where Social Media Marketing segments into another dimension – Social Influence marketing.

The Need for ROI

There is still no way around it – without the ability to not only find influencers but measure their impact on the bottom line is critical to the success of any Social Media Marketing campaign.

“Qualified Leads (35%) is always going to be the CFO’s measure of social media results. The marketing buzzwords of “activity,” “brand,” and “sentiment” are not going to hold water in 2012 for most businesses.”

eMarketer SMROI Chart

Automating the Search for Peer Influencers

So with social media marketing budgets that are small and with pressures of demonstrating ROI, how can marketers leverage technology that will enable them to transcend from a world where brand marketing and direct response were all that mattered to leveraging IM? Here at Terametric we are developing sophisticated technologies to find peer influencers on a continuous basis.

We offer a free product that does just that (see: Inbox Influencer). Take the first step and try it today!

Posted in Influence, Social Influence Marketing, Social Media ROI, Wendy Troupe's Perspectives | View Comments

The Top 5 Social Media ROI Predictions for 2012

Posted in Big Data, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Metrics, Social Media ROI, Wendy Troupe's Perspectives by Wendy Troupe on December 23rd, 2011
 

For the past few years, marketers have been working to define the metrics and methods to measure social media ROI but have they gotten any closer to establishing metrics that actually matter? Marketers now know that counting fans, followers, and influence is not the best way to measure their campaign investments in social media. Yet we find that these metrics are often the top benchmarks for performance. So is it true that in 2012, marketers still consider calculating return on investment to be the biggest challenge of using social media?

Research from Chief Marketer found that two in five marketers have little confidence in the effectiveness of their ability to measure social media campaigns.

So what is preventing marketers from establishing industry standards for measuring the effectiveness of social media and what will enable them to make 2012 the year of social media ROI? Here are the top 5 ways we think it can happen:

  1. Apply business-level analysis to social media measurement and set benchmarks for pre/post comparisons to determine its true impact.
  2. Segment social media metrics into 3 distinct buckets:
    - Revenue/Business Development (sales, average order value, lead gen, etc.)
    - Cost Savings (recruitment savings, online media mentions vs. PR agency fees, online customer support vs. call center fees, etc.)
    - Qualitative Metrics (such as share of voice, brand awareness, influence and so on)
  3. Choose the right technology, tools, metrics and collaboration to strengthen social media programs – it goes without saying that measurement and monitoring social media can be time consuming and wasteful without the right tools that can sift through this enormous set of data – both qualitatively and quantitatively.
  4. Invest in dedicated resources – the big question for companies that have not yet fully created dedicated social media business units is deciding who in the company is supposed to be handling it, what are the new skill sets that are required, and how will they interface with other groups.
  5. Focus marketing efforts on meaningful social engagement interactions instead of cheap impression strategies – move beyond campaigns that capture “likes” and “followers” into more meaningful interactions that support and build your community such as answering product questions and troubleshooting customer product issues which result in strong brand loyalty.

In the end, the competitive advantage goes to companies who quickly figure out how to tackle these issues in 2012 and the time is NOW to begin.  We’re hopeful companies and brands not only achieve but surpass these predictions in social business and we look forward to working towards that same end in the New Year!

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Closed Loop Marketing: Leveraging Twitter Analytics in Real Time

Posted in Big Data, Social CRM, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Metrics, Twitter ROI, Wendy Troupe's Perspectives by Wendy Troupe on December 5th, 2011
 

In my last post about the opportunities that big data presents for marketers, I illustrated how external data – when collected and analyzed – can provide awareness, intent and conversions and when combined with customer relationship management systems, provides opportunity for customer support and engagement.

Connecting the dots between external and internal data presents a new opportunity for marketing to directly impact sales and customer support.

It’s also about closing the loop – or closed loop marketing. A closed loop marketing system allows marketers to determine which activities in one or more channels are the most efficient sources of new customers.

With closed loop marketing marketers can track leads from their initial contact through a first conversion all the way to becoming a customer. This allows you to see which channel activities are the most efficient and gives you actionable insight to make smart marketing investments.

How Does Closed Loop Marketing Work?

Closed Loop Marketing

It begins with collecting and measuring activities in Twitter and other marketing and sales channels such as your website, blog, community and CRM system. Each activity is weighted according to its ability to drive conversion.

1. Measurement & Optimization

  • Comparing oubound (what you do in Twitter) vs. inbound (what happens as a result) metrics
  • Competitive benchmarking (compare your results to your top competitors)
  • Daily averages over 14 days (collect data on a daily basis and reset after 14 days)
  • Optimized over time (look for patterns over time and adjust the weights or relevance of individual metric values)

Once you’ve analyzed the data, its about choosing the most under performing metrics relative to your competitors and incorporating them into your outbound activities.

2. Efficient & Effective Outbound Activities

  • Who to follow (identify those active members of your Twitterverse to follow)
  • When to tweet (identify when the most active times are to tweet relative to trending topics of conversation)
  • What to tweet about (identify highly influential and trending topics of conversation to maximize the activity levels of your tweets)

Tracking that outbound activity with the results – or inbound activity – is critical to knowing whether the predictive capability of your initial analysis is accurate.

3. ROI Analysis

  • Soft conversions (conversions that generate engagement vs. actual revenue)
  • Customer support (actual customer interactions on Twitter)
  • Sales cycle & conversions (conversions that generate revenue or shorten the sales cycle)

Due to the real time nature of Twitter, this process is ongoing and data should be collected on a daily basis but analyzed on a weekly basis. What you do this week on Twitter might be different the next. When this is done in real time, the results yield highly targeted and efficient use of Twitter.

Posted in Big Data, Social CRM, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Metrics, Twitter ROI, Wendy Troupe's Perspectives | View Comments

Leveraging Big Data: THE Major Theme at Defrag

Posted in Big Data, Social CRM, Social Media ROI, Strategy and Analysis, Wendy Troupe's Perspectives by Wendy Troupe on November 15th, 2011
 

Upon returning from the 5th annual Defrag conference in Denver, it became evident very quickly that the major theme at the conference was “big data”.  Although the notion of big data has been around for some time in other industries, social media has created a whole new and exponentially larger deluge of data for businesses to leverage within the last couple of years.

To be exact:

  • IBM just completed a study and found that more than 90% of the data in the world today was created in the last two years.
  • Facebook allows users to share 30 billion pieces of content each month.
  • Twitter’s active user base generates 250 million tweets per day.
  • Combined, these sites create 17 terabytes of data every day.
  • In total, every day we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data.

What are the dimensions and challenges of big data? Roger Ehrenberg broke it down really well. Big data is:

  • Complex
  • Large
  • Unstructured
  • Real Time

Likewise, Jive’s David Gutelius described big data similarly using– the Four V’s analogy:

  • Velocity
  • Variety
  • Volume
  • Volatility

But let’s be clear – big data is in its infancy and growing at an exponentially high rate.

Analytics is More than Counting

This new data deluge promises to provide us the opportunity to turn information overload into an asset for better decision making by applying analytics. Even within analytics, it is more than just counting total volumes of activity – it is about mining intelligence from disparate data sources – looking for the patterns and relationships in the data itself.

Think of big data as the words of a story – by themselves they have limited meaning. When you add grammar and structure, you begin to link together these words and can develop many different meaning and insights from the collection of words.  The science of big data is similar – data stored in information systems are the words and the emerging data analytics is the grammar which allows analysts and decision makers to derive meaning from data.

There are some challenges in doing it the old way in collecting these huge volumes of data and analyzing it. It can be inefficient and cost prohibitive and difficult to scale.  People and resources are being wasted. It is estimated that employees spend up to two hours a day looking for the right information, such as analyzing tweet streams.

Collecting smaller subsets of data and analyzing it for patterns over time will provide better predictive capability that just storing and counting total volumes.

Your Customers Are Engaging in Real Time

And businesses are finding that they have to move quickly. Their customers are multiplying like rabbits online.

Did you know that socially engaged consumers spend more on brands than those people who don’t interact? That’s according to a new Bain & Company report, which studied social media and its role in marketing.

Apparently, the study found that people who talk to brands on networks like Twitter and Facebook spend 20 to 40 percent more money on their products and services compared to those who don’t. They also show a ‘deeper emotional commitment’ to companies who use social media – 33 per cent higher than the common measure for customer loyalty.

Due to the speed and access of information at their fingertips, consumers expect the same quick response if they talk to brands online. For example, if someone ‘tweets’ a brand, they expect an instant reply. If they don’t get this ‘real-time customer service’, they’ll feel ignored and your reputation could be at stake.

Looking at these fascinating facts and figures, it’s clear. Engagement adds real value these days, a crucial aspect of movement marketing. But how does engagement lead to more sales?

Big Data is About Connecting the Dots

With this extremely large and unstructured data set that consists of qualitative, quantitative and the social graph, there is a smaller very relevant subset of data that represent opportunities for sales and marketing to capitalize on. When this data set is combined and correlated with an organization’s internal data set, it becomes a lead-gen pipeline for  and a more efficient and effective method of attracting, engaging and supporting customers – in real time.

External data when collected and analyzed can provide awareness, intent and conversions and when combined with customer relationship management systems, provide opportunity for customer support and engagement.

Connecting the dots between external and internal data presents a new opportunity for marketing to directly impact sales and customer support.

Posted in Big Data, Social CRM, Social Media ROI, Strategy and Analysis, Wendy Troupe's Perspectives | View Comments

Is There a Return on Influence? Top 5 Uses of Influence to Increase #SMROI

Posted in Focus Roundtable Discussions, Social Media ROI, Strategy and Analysis, Wendy Troupe's Perspectives by Wendy Troupe on November 3rd, 2011
 

How does Influence Measure in the Effectiveness of Your Social Media Campaign? Maurene Grey, of Grey Consulting and a Focus Expert, recently posted this question challenging the validity of traditional methods of measuring ROI (return on investment) in favor of influence and the “viralibility” of a social campaign as a better alternative.

Should we move away from hard conversion metrics in favor of the soft?

With the emergence of Klout, PeerIndex, and Terametric, we can see how identifying the most active and therefore influential people to help drive word-of-mouth through the social channels about your brand or product can generate real Revenue $$. This new business model is an emerging and nascent one but is it the only way to driving relevant return on the effectiveness of social media campaigns? What about the traditional methods of measuring a campaign’s success as Chris Selland suggests – “in terms of whether it moves opportunities INTO the a lead qualification funnel, and/or moves them THROUGH the funnel (or both)”.

Influence alone can’t be the only measure of a campaigns success but it is becoming the largest driver of how a campaign is executed and measured. Here are the top 5 ways you can use Influence to create a successful social media campaign:

  1. Quality of your Audience: understanding how consistently and active your audience in the social channels is an important gauge of how well your campaign will resonate and convert. Measuring the influence of your followers, friends and colleagues over time is top on the list.
  2. Trending Conversations:  using influence as a way to identify trending conversations as they happen helps to filter out the noise and zero in on topics that will drive engagement and ultimately determine the relevance and success of your social media campaign.
  3. Competitive Intelligence: measuring and benchmarking the influence of your competitors will help you to understand how you’re improving your competitive position in the marketplace and is essential in your ability calculate an accurate return on your marketing investment.
  4. Channel Mix: identifying the level of influence you have in Twitter, Facebook, and/or LinkedIn will help you calculate the right channels to target for your campaigns making you more efficient and effective in your campaign efforts.
  5. Lead Generation: using influence to identify, track and measure the frequency, diversity, and volume of social interactions is way to qualify potential prospects and leads for the sales pipeline.

Influence by itself is a “soft” metric and can’t by itself determine the success of your social media campaign. It can contribute in many ways to your ability to develop and execute the right campaign and targeting the right audience which will ultimately drive the “hard” metrics of traditional campaign success.

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Twitter Curation: How Can Your Tweets Generate Marketing ROI?

Posted in Big Data, Content Marketing, Optimizer for Twitter, Twitter Marketing, Twitter ROI, Wendy Troupe's Perspectives by Wendy Troupe on October 21st, 2011
 

Here at Terametric, we’ve developed a methodology that analyzes a marketer’s relevant Twitter activity and can help them to compose a “healthy” tweet. What makes a tweet “healthy”?  Tweets that can reach the right audience, at the right time, with the right message can drive highest likelihood of the ultimate goal – conversions.

Conversion activity is defined in volume of one or more of the following activities:

  • Retweets
  • Link Sharing
  • Replies
  • @mentions
  • Follows

Ultimately, composing a healthy tweet is based on your ability to include the the following components that are currently trending high in the Twittersphere:

  • The most influential people (@handle).
  • The right conversations (#hashtags).
  • A shortened url for further engagement beyond Twitter.
  • The right retweeted keywords.
  • A positive call to action.

Optimizer for Twitter Real-Time Curation Logic

So how do you know what is currently trending and relevant? Twitter is real time and knowing how to pick up on the right components and the right time is critical.

Terametric’s curation methodology is based on a letter grading scale of F (for failure to convert) to A+ (most likely to convert). A tweet gets a C (average) grade when it includes the basic components of a tweet including a hashtag, a shortened url, an “@” mention, keywords that are relevant to your brand, product or industry, and a positive call to action. If any of those components are trending in the Twittersphere, the grade goes up from there.

The Bottom Line

Marketers should be informed in real time when they are using Twitter. The data should work for them so that they can monitor trending conversations and are enabled to act on them when they are happening.

For a free trial of Optimizer for Twitter,  sign up today!

Posted in Big Data, Content Marketing, Optimizer for Twitter, Twitter Marketing, Twitter ROI, Wendy Troupe's Perspectives | View Comments

Engagement Metrics for Twitter: 5 Measures that Can Deliver Big Results

Posted in Twitter Marketing, Twitter ROI, Uncategorized, Wendy Troupe's Perspectives by Wendy Troupe on September 28th, 2011
 

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.

  1. Total Engagement – The overall measure of metrics 2, 3, 4, and 5.
  2. New Followers Per Day – The rate in which the number of followers is growing.
  3. Follower Influence – Based on a score of 1 (low) to 5 (high), what is the average level of influence of your followers?
  4. Retweets (RTs) – The average number of retweets (RTs) generated by each of your tweets.
  5. Average Tweet Grade – Based on the quality and composition of your tweets – on a scale of F for failure to A+ for exceptional – what is the average quality of your tweets?

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.

Followers Per Day

Calculation Methodology:

Follower growth should be a weekly rate also calculated using 14 days’ worth of data.

Follower Growth Rate

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.

Follower Influence

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.

Retweets (RTs)

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.

Average Tweet Grade

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.

See Plans & Pricing.

Posted in Twitter Marketing, Twitter ROI, Uncategorized, Wendy Troupe's Perspectives | View Comments

Harvesting the Maximum Value of Twitter Influence in Real Time

Posted in Influence, Social Media Marketing, Social Media ROI, Strategy and Analysis, Twitter ROI, Wendy Troupe's Perspectives by Wendy Troupe on June 2nd, 2011
 

Influence as Real Time Measurement

Influence as a measure in Twitter is an important tool in a marketer’s arsenal and a measure of your:

  • Overall effectiveness as a marketer.
  • Ability to attract influential followers.
  • Engagement with the appropriate audiences.
  • Ability to generate qualified sales conversions (leads, downloads, etc.).

But it is high time to move beyond the measure itself and apply it in real time to determine the what, when and who of Twitter moderation and curation.

How can influence be used to identify the right people who are conversing on a particular topic, referencing a hashtag or other trending tweet component or to measure it’s potential for being RT (retweeted)? How do you identify when you should send out information that will resonate with the right influencers at a time that is relevant – particularly if it is in real time? Moreover, what is a good measure of influence beyond the number of followers you have?

Influence as Real Time Monitoring

The answer today results in a lot of manual monitoring and analysis of Twitter data. A marketer might use products such as Twitalyzer, Cotweet, Radian6, Klout, and Timely. Conversion tracking through websites, blogs, Salesforce adds another layer of complexity to it which has to be included in the ROI of this real time channel.

Measurement also takes on a new dimension when it analyzes the influence of one’s followers. That’s not to say that it is necessary to measure the influence of every follower you have but to measure the rolling average of the active followers over time. Don Dodge just posted his numeric take on Twitter and how to make sense of its value through the evaluation of one’s followers.

In addition,  influence reins supreme but it is a moving target and should be measured in a way that is relevant and contextual. Knowing your Klout score is a valid measure of your influence to the masses (if you want to compare yourself to Justin Beiber or President Obama) but a more effective measure of influence is how you compare to your product competitors.

Influence as Real-Time Marketing

The concept of real-time marketing transcends the “right message at the right-time” and delivers real-time targeting through the right online channel (Twitter, Facebook, mobile, email, etc.). Influence is the underlying metric that can help marketers determine which message will resonate in the right channel at the right time. Brian Solis expands on this concept with influence being the underlying factor in building a customer-centric model.

Marketing Automization Driving ROI

At the end of the day, this is all about marketing automization and we are in the early stages of its evolution. The socialization of marketing’s channels is the driving force behind it. Steve Woods in a recent interview sums up the current evolution of marketing automization which moves beyond just static online solutions to the identification and qualification of lead activity through online channels in The Second Wave of Marketing Automation.

Marketers will ultimately succeed when they can identify which channel mix will drive leads into the sales funnel based in deep data analysis and calculated ROI and we are at the cusp of making the connections between online channels to do so.

Sign up to see how Optimizer for Twitter can provide a one-stop-shop for this type of real time optimization and deep analysis.

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Chris Selland Says Terametric is the Next Big Thing

Posted in Social Media Metrics, Strategy and Analysis, Twitter ROI, Wendy Troupe's Perspectives by Wendy Troupe on April 4th, 2011
 

According to Chris Selland, Terametric is the “next big thing.”  Who’s Chris Selland?  He just joined Terametric as Vice President of Sales and Marketing.  I sat down with Chris for a Q&A on Twitter marketing, Twitter metrics, and yes, why Terametric – and why you should care.

WT: What’s your interest in Twitter?

CS: I’m a huge advocate of social networking in general and Twitter in particular.  As witnessed by the events of these past few months, Twitter has had a massive impact on not just the world of business but the world beyond.  Yet, I am firmly convinced we are only at the leading edge of that transformation.

WT: What is the biggest challenge people have with Twitter today?

CS: Despite Twitter’s massive growth and promise, using it effectively and in a manner that provides measurable business value remains a significant challenge for many organizations. As  former Forrester analyst Augie Ray said in a post entitled, ‘The Next Big Thing is…’ this past week:

Just as SAP and Rackspace did for the Web, the hot companies of the next decade will be the ones that make social media manageable for the enterprise.

WT: Social media tools are hot.  The marketing is emerging quickly and it’s getting quite loud.  What’s does Terametric bring that’s different from what’s available today?

CS: Harnessing Twitter’s growth and potential – and making it manageable – requires organizations to extract & analyze fast-moving and highly-relevant information from the Twitter stream – and to then develop and deploy proactive strategies to leverage that information into action. This is exactly what Terametric’s Optimizer for Twitter platform is designed to provide.

WT:  Tell us a little about yourself.

CS: I’m a technology business development and marketing executive with deep domain expertise in the areas of alliance strategies, corporate development/M&A, content and CRM strategy.  I spent many years as a technology industry analyst at the Yankee Group, Reservoir Partners, and Aberdeen Group.  In addition to my role with Terametric, I’m a Focus research expert in the areas of sales, marketing and customer service.  I frequently blog at SiliconANGLE and StockTwitsTech.

WT:  Chris, welcome aboard!  Things are going to get exciting!

– Wendy

@wendytroupe
@terametric

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Avoiding Data Paralysis – Making the Case for REAL Actionable Insight and Twitter ROI

Posted in Social Media Metrics, Social Media Pains, Twitter ROI, Wendy Troupe's Perspectives by Wendy Troupe on February 14th, 2011
 

We are getting closer to the launch of our product, Optimizer for Twitter, and I thought I’d take the opportunity to start blogging about what kind of activities drive performance in Twitter based on our analysis of the Twitterverse. To begin, I’ll discuss in more detail how we’re solving the problem of helping marketers improve their daily Tweeting activities.

For companies engaging in Twitter, real time communication with external communities is something that requires generating consistent and high levels of “tweeting” which is enormously labor intensive day-in and day-out. Adding dedicated resources to solve that problem isn’t efficient either because there is no reason why so much time should be spent pouring through measurement and monitoring data in order to figure out what to tweet about and how often. Collecting data shouldn’t be a means to an end but an enabling force to identify what will yeild the best Twitter activity and in turn lead to the highest conversions.


Value in $ = Value Out $$$

That’s where Optimizer for Twitter comes in. Optimizer doesn’t just collect and count the Twitter activity of customer and competitor handles, it analyzes that activity over time to identify the most optimal Twitter activities for you relative to your competitors. Based on this analysis, Optimizer searches through the entire Twitterverse and identifies tweets that will improve the likelihood for your to increase your level of conversion activity. What’s more, marketers are able to automatically track their activity and measure it against a benchmark of data enables a marketer to calculate their increase in performance and ROI.

We’ve got the data that makes the case that 2011 is the year for social media ROI is within reach and Optimizer is poised to help marketers make it happen — to not only meet that goal but demonstrate it in real time!

Here are just a few of the ways Optimizer for Twitter can help your business optimize its conversations:

  • Trending Tweets with Influence – we filter through the billions of tweets and find the conversations that you need to tweet about and we sort them by topic/theme, hashtag, Bit.ly, negative and positive sentiment, influencer, and specific mentions of you and your competitor brand, product & industry keywords so that you never have to say to yourself, what will I tweet about today?!
  • Engagement, Influence & Sentiment Analysis & Tracking – based on our proprietary analytical methods, we measure and analyze the most important measures in Twitter and allow you to track these measures historically and sort them by industry, product & brand levels.
  • Performance Scoring – we measure and analyze the performance of over 80 metrics and provide you with an overall score of performance for multiple handles together or singularly so that you can get an easy view into the health of your twitter marketing efforts.
  • Campaign ROI – we allow you to capture performance over time periods that relate to specific campaigns and compared to relative historical benchmarks of activity.
  • Competitive Analysis & Benchmarking – at the core of our analysis is our ability to track up to 15 Twitter competitor handles and compare them to your activity which provides marketers a context for comparison that is relevant to their industry, product and brand.

To sum things up, ask yourself if any of the solutions you currently use actually enable you tweet more efficiently and effectively. Don’t know what to Tweet about? We’ll get you up and running without in minutes and you’ll be on the fast path to utilizing Twitter as a powerful marketing channel for conversions.

We’re pretty excited about how we’re using data to enable real time optimization of marketing activities. Aren’t we beyond just counting and visualizing marketing data? It’s time to put data to work!!

In the upcoming weeks, I’ll be blogging more about the actual metrics that drive performance in Twitter based on our initial product rollout with customers.

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