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.

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.

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