Welcome to Friday, February 11, 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 are all hard-core ROI:
Some companies are still have trouble understanding the return on investment of a well-run social media campaign. In an effort to take into account short attention spans and a general lack of interest in changing hard and fast attitudes we’ve put together a quick, and easy, piece here to show how social media not only gives a great return on investment, it now surpasses most traditional media.
Marketers Optimistic About Finding Social Media ROI
Marketers are hopeful that this will be the year that they finally link social media marketing to ROI, a new survey says.
CMOs: Highest Social Media ROI From User-Generated Content
Though measurement remains a challenge, improvements in ROI were recorded in 2010 across all social channels analyzed, compared with 2009 levels.
The United States Small Business Association defines a company with gross receipts of up to a maximum, on average, of $7MM dollars as a Small Medium Business (SMB). Therefore, when it comes to social media marketing, SMBs have small very small budgets and should be more sensitive to the impact of negative ROI on their social media marketing efforts. SMBs may view social media channels, such as Twitter, as a cheap or zero-cost way to extend their marketing and public relations functions. However, contrary to being cheap and effective, non-benchmarked and non-optimized, Twitter marketing, can be costly and can result in mostly negative ROI due to lack of sales or marketing contributions to the business.
Under-estimating the required time and resources for Twitter Marketing
MarketingProfs recently released a study that took a look at Social Media Marketing companies that have been using social media for more than three years and they found that these veterans are spending more on social media. Around 21.8% of social media marketing veterans say they devote at least two full-time staffers to social media, compared with 5% of rookies. However, most SMBs cannot afford to place full-time staff on their Social Media and Twitter marketing programs. These firms may have someone tweet a few times or for a few minutes, daily with the hope that someone will see a Tweet or that their brand awareness will grow. That’s a hope-and-pray strategy for most. Without any benchmark as to what is required to increase awareness or drive sales on Twitter, most SMB Twitter accounts, even with large followers fail to deliver positive ROI for their organizations.
Missing or very little Twitter Marketing strategy
Underestimating time and resources contributes to a lack of a clear and solid strategic plan for Twitter campaigns as part of a broader marketing engagement. Most Twitter marketing tools are free or a very low cost, relative to other marketing services and software. As such, it’s very tempting for any company, SMB or otherwise to get setup on Twitter and start tweeting. According to Social Media Guru Matt Singley, “the biggest temptation for any company with social media is that they want to jump right in without setting goals or having a strategy.” SMBs are sufficiently small that they may not have organizational resources to map out complex strategic approaches to their marketing programs. However, it’s still critical to have a Twitter marketing strategy that includes benchmarking, measurement and campaign optimization.
No Twitter Campaign Optimization
Even those SMBs that measure, many may not be optimizing their Twitter marketing campaigns, daily as sentiment, trends, and influence changes online. Firstly, SMBs may be local or regional businesses without large, global data-sets of data to process transactions and customer engagements. As such, these companies may see optimization as novel or out of reach of their organizational capabilities. Also, most free measurement tools provide measurement, but no benchmark in real-time. As a result, these companies fail to initially and continuously benchmark their performance against their target markets. Thus, they fail to optimize their Twitter marketing campaigns in real-time.
Failure to plan a strategy and to acquire a factual estimate of what it takes to be successful on Twitter means that most SMBs will try and dip their toes with a little Twitter marketing and expend ineffective resources to stay in the game. However, most will see only negative ROI from Twitter marketing continue to persist and may give up on Twitter as not effective.
Are you an SMB that wants Positive ROI from your social media and Twitter marketing objectives? Email us and ask about our risk-free trial of Twitter Optimizer for Small and Medium-sized Businesses.
Companies use Facebook and Twitter for marketing and customer engagement. However, the ability to measure and maximize marketing return on investment, ROI, may differ across platforms. We’ve heard that compared to Twitter, Facebook is easier for marketers to understand the financial return on investment of a social media campaign. For those firms that are committed to building community engagement on all social media platforms, here are two critical reasons why it may be hard to calculate ROI on Twitter.
Facebook Fan Pages vs. Tweet Streams:
Facebook fan pages are essentially microsites that give social media marketers the ability to see how customers interact with their brand on Facebook web pages. In contrast, tweet streams are live, real-time, engagements that may consist of multiple conversations conducted across multiple hashtags and communities. Firms that have thousands of fans can easily verify and respond to fan activity on Facebook pages quickly. However, on Twitter, analytics tools offer limited insight into the quality of community engagement with a particular brand. The best way to track activity would be to keep up with each discussion on Twitter, over time. However, without some form of automation, that would be impossible for social media marketers to manually accomplish.
Promoted Tweets are nearly here but most marketers still wait:
Twitter’s Promoted Tweets will soon arrive to deliver Facebook-like ads to marketers seeking to invest advertising dollars on Twitter. Promoted Tweets show promise to deliver targeted advertising that will ensure that the right community sees the right message. Given that conversations are happening now, social media marketers cannot afford to wait until Promoted Tweets arrive. They still need to engage in community conversation and share valuable information regarding their products and services. Many companies are still taking a “wait and see” approach to Twitter marketing while their customers and their competitors engage each other today.
Therefore, determining your return maybe more simple on Facebook, but you should not be ignoring or waiting to use Twitter as a social media channel. Social Media Marketers should be aware that measuring and improving Twitter ROI will be difficult until the tools develop and mature. However, firms should not “wait and see” if Twitter can deliver additional reach and influence as successful firms already leverage Twitter to deliver increased marketing impact. Waiting only ensures that firms that learn how to extract the maximum value from social media will extend their edge in the real-time business arena.
This post is Terametric’s Twitter ROI Series leading up to the December 9, 2010 Webinar: “How to measure and improve your Twitter Marketing ROI” with Jim Sterne, Kyle Lacy and Wendy Troupe.
Mike Volpe is VP Marketing at HubSpot (Twitter: @HubSpot) and you can follow him on Twitter (@mvolpe) if you dare! HubSpot has over 44,000 followers on Twitter and is one of the leading examples of a B2B company using social media marketing
Be interesting with long form content. Companies who have a blog get 79% more Twitter followers [http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/5459/Small-Businesses-That-Blog-Have-102-More-Twitter-Followers.aspx] than companies who do not have a blog. Why? Well, by having a blog with interesting and useful content, and then Tweeting out those articles as headlines and links makes you much more interesting. Celebrities can be interesting in 140 characters, but most businesses cannot. Leverage long form content (blog articles, videos, presentations) to make your Twitter feed more useful to your followers and you’ll attract more followers and your content will spread further.
Sell, but not too much. We don’t offer discounts or other blatant promotions through Twitter, but we do post messages about our webinars, ebooks and other lead generating offers. If we only posted messages about things that generated leads for us and required registration, we’d be boring or even annoying and would not have attracted a large audience of followers. However if we never Tweeted anything that nudged people towards our sales process, we would not have any leads or sales from our efforts on Twitter and the ROI would be horrible. The key is balance!
Recycle your Tweets. Twitter is a fast paced world. The shelf life of Tweets is very short. For your best Tweets, there is nothing wrong with recycling them days or months later. As long as the content is still relevant and useful, repeating a Tweet 6 hours or 6 weeks later can work great, especially if you have Tweeted about other things in between and also reply to and get personal with other Tweets. We were able to increase the traffic to our blog [http://blog.hubspot.com] from Twitter by over 20% by repeating tweets to some of our very old (but still very good and very relevant) blog articles. People even Retweeted the messages and thanks us for sharing the articles with them.
What quick tips do you have to offer on improving your ROI from Twitter? Leave a comment and share with your friends!
This post is Terametric’s Twitter ROI Series leading up to the December 9, 2010 Webinar: “How to measure and improve your Twitter Marketing ROI” with Jim Sterne and Kyle Lacy.
David Meerman Scott published a recent eBook: “Real-Time” marketing that I would definitely encourage everyone to read for its unique way of merging stock market analysis and social media marketing. In it he takes a look at the Fortune 100 companies, surveying which companies practice real-time marketing and which companies do not. David discovered that companies that practiced real-time marketing outperformed the S&P500 from 2009 – 2010, over those companies that weren’t real-time. Taking his approach of grouping successful real-time companies and measuring performance, marketers can also maximize Twitter marketing ROI using a similar portfolio method.
Source: http://www.davidmeermanscott.com
Create your Twitter portfolio
David had the Fortune 100 as his portfolio of companies to measure real-time effectiveness. Twitter marketers should build a portfolio of the top industry competitors and key influencers or advocates in their industries and maximize their Twitter marketing against such a group. A portfolio of Twitter handles makes it easy to build Twitter lists and to segment entire markets in Twitter without worrying about how to communicate to the entire Twitterverse. For example, if your industry is in the enterprise data-storage space, then your Twitter portfolio should consists of all competitors and influencers of the enterprise industry-storage space. Ideally, you’d want the industry’s top performers in your portfolio by revenue, market-share to get the best. Likewise, your portfolio should consist of the top influencers and advocates who use Twitter to engage their online communities.
Monitor your Twitter Portfolio
The great thing about Twitter is that you can monitor all the important industry conversations in real-time. Twitter features such as lists allow marketers to segment their messages and monitor, in real-time, the conversations. Twitter tools abound to help monitor tweets as they occur. Pick your favorite tool and capture the trends in the topics, hashtags and bit.ly links. Sentiment and influence tools should also indicate the context of conversations and the critical trends and topics.
Benchmark against your portfolio
In order to measure Return on Investment of any business activity, you’ll need to understand the investment required to reach a particular goal. Twitter portfolios can help you understand exactly what resources are required to engage the community on Twitter and to receive a target response or inbound impact. If your competitors are tweeting sales promotions once a day and seeing successful conversions and Twitter follow growth, then there may not be a need to invest in hourly tweeting. Likewise, if your competitors have invested heavily in multiple twitter accounts, then your Twitter marketing ROI will require investing in matching outbound activities across multiple twitter handles.
Successful real-time companies have similar Twitter engagement success profiles online. Monitoring and benchmarking against the key players in your industry will allow marketers to understand the investment needed to drive successful Twitter marketing campaigns.
This post is Terametric’s Twitter ROI Series leading up to the December 9, 2010 Webinar: How to measure and improve your Twitter Marketing ROI with Jim Sterne and Kyle Lacy.
Given such a high number, is it possible that most social media programs are already immensely successful delivering continuously positive ROI for their companies? Thus, it’s possible that most professionals don’t have a critical need to measure the ROI of their programs. Alternatively, it’s also quite possible that most social media professionals don’t wish to measure the ROI of their programs because they would most possibly be negative. If your job is on the line for positive ROI, wouldn’t it be just easier to ignore measurement and avoid any the consequences of negative ROI?
If a Social Media programs, like Twitter, deliver negative ROI, there are several reasons why this could occur and negative ROI isn’t necessarily a bad thing. However, negative ROI does not need to be a foregone conclusion and there are three critical aspects of the social media Twitter marketing process may contribute to persistently negative ROI.
Lack of Twitter marketing benchmarks:
In order to determine the required social media investment into a Twitter marketing campaign, marketers must know what resources will be required to run a successful campaign. A very helpful way to determine required resources would be to benchmark an industry segment of competitive or industry Twitter handles having the most impact or securing a high degree of engagement and influence online. How much do these handles tweet, on average? How many times are these handles mentioned and retweeted? Putting together a portfolio of the top Twitter handles, their tweeting frequency, topics and sentiment would make it easier to determine the effort and investment required to run a successful Twitter program.
Lack of Correlation Analysis
Causal analysis of Twitter Marketing requires complete and thorough attribution of all Twitter activity into all possible inbound impacts or conversions to sale. Companies that have immediate conversion from Tweet to purchase can easily measure the causal impact of their outbound tweeting activity. However, if a social media professional has a longer sales cycle than a consumer purchase (Dell or Starbucks) or even a small data set of customers, then causal analysis would be very difficult. A better approach would be correlation analysis of inbound and outbound metrics. Correlation analysis helps marketers monitor whether outbound activities have inbound impact across online and offline marketing channels. Correlation is also great for those companies that don’t have large budgets to purchase customized marketing analysis services.
Lack of in-campaign optimization
If a Twitter marketing campaign is showing negative ROI, that’s something that one can calculate immediately by measuring revenues generated or successful inbound conversions. Assuming that a Twitter campaign lasts more than one day, lack of optimization could cause negative ROI to persist. Folks that accept negative ROI as just the way social media works may ignore the opportunity to optimize Twitter outbound activities to align with inbound goals. Continuous optimization is needed not only to aim for positive ROI, but to maximize positive ROI as well.
Negative Twitter marketing ROI doesn’t have to be endemic to social media and social media professionals should welcome and be eager to measure the ROI of their investment in Twitter and other channels. With proper benchmarking, correlation analysis, and in-campaign optimization, firms can understand how to generate positive ROI with each Twitter marketing campaign.
This post is Terametric’s Twitter ROI Series leading up to the December 9, 2010 Webinar: How-To measure and improve your Twitter Marketing ROIwith Jim Sterne and Kyle Lacy.
As of this piece, Twitter’s Promoted Tweets are still in closed beta.
However, for those lucky companies invited to participate, evidence suggest that this new form of advertising changes the game for maximizing the inbound impact of Twitter marketing. Kathleen Colan and the Mongoose Metrics team put together an initial case study on promoted tweet experience in the Business-to-Business (B2B) market. Interpreting the results of this initial case-study, we identified a new and interesting way that promoted tweets metrics greatly maximizes Twitter marketing ROI.
Source: Mongoose Metrics
Promoted tweets impact tweeting visibility to key industry players, including prospective customers, if targeted to the right audience. The Mongoose Metrics team shared that they experienced an increase of over 700 new Twitter followers in the space of 1 month of their Promoted tweets campaign.
Activity:
If we assume that their promoted tweets were targeted to a highly relevant group of Twitter members, based on industry profile and other filters, what would be the impact? We think that Mongoose metrics’ promoted tweets would stimulate more relevant followers to Mongoose Metrics, either interested in their product or engaged participants in their industry.
Influence:
Adding quality, relevant followers is a key metric of inbound Twitter marketing success and community engagement. Increasing followers also positively impacts the follower-to-following ratio, another key measure of Twitter influence. A large number of followers, relative to the people that you follow, indicates a high degree of influence. Thus, a promoted tweet delivers greater influence by increasing the ratio of followers.
Engagement:
Additionally, promoted tweets should also correlate with increased additions to the Twitter list of industry participants, yet another key metric for measuring and maximizing inbound Twitter impact.
Positive ROI:
Did Mongoose Metrics’ price for each promoted tweet include the costs to add 700 more relevant followers or possibly more Twitter lists? If we consider the resources required to generate 700 industry-relevant followers, in a period of 1 month, I’m confident we may conclude that Twitter’s promoted tweet program was substantially a zero cost for Mongoose Metrics to add new followers. Given that the cost, to companies, of generating impact with tweets increases as Twitter increases in size and sophistication, we can confidently conclude that there are substantial returns to companies that will be able to advertise on the platform, via the promoted tweet.
Social Media ROI is the hot topic of 2010. There are so many different approaches to measuring the financial impact of Social Media engagement in the marketing mix. Marketers know the importance of Social Media engagement, but they still need to bring their organizations along and educate them on the evolving process of setting investment and impact objectives. Once marketers can measure ROI, they can then maximize their returns by optimizing engagement. From our own research, we’ve learned six key steps to Social Media ROI measurement and optimization Nirvana:
1. Set a Social Media Campaign trial start and stop date:
Scientific measurement of Social Media ROI or any business performance requires discrete campaign periods. Whether you’re a large company running a large Social Media promotion or a small company with one Twitter accounts, scoping Social Media engagement in discrete time makes it easy to measure and validate Social Media ROI impact. It also makes it easy to track changes.
2. List your inbound objectives and metrics:
Let’s define the inbound objectives of Social Media as the measurable campaign and company interactions of customers and prospects during the social media campaign. Social Media inbound metrics can be infinite and varied and there are critical inbound metrics to track. However, for effective ROI measurement, they must be scoped. Like all marketing campaigns, Social Media must have a specific measure of success. What touch points with a customer matter? Explicitly describe the discrete inbound activities and your appropriate measurements.
3. List your outbound resources and outbound activities:
Although there are infinite outbound activities, Social Media Managers have limited outbound resources. What outbound activities will you execute during the campaign? Again, there are critical outbound metrics to capture. Can we clearly scope and define these as well? Will it be tweeting, re-tweeting, advertising blogging, or following? Outbound resources also act as a constraint on what outbound activities we can attempt in our Social Media campaign.
4. Execute your Social Media Campaign:
This is the hard part. Execute the scheduled outbound activities and capture the inbound responses and actions, within the Social Media campaign plan. Limit adjustments to your outbound activities or inbound metrics, during your campaign.
5. Measure performance:
Measure your resulting performance against your expected or desired performance and measure the change in your baseline inbound activities relative to you’re the activities of your outbound efforts. If there’s a positive change in your inbound activities, then there may be a positive ROI. The impact measure will depend on the inbound measurements you chose. For example, click-through, page views, purchases, downloads, etc.
6. Optimize your outbound activities and run your campaign again:
Optimization means recalibrating your outbound activities to your target inbound activities to maximize your return on investment or to hit your target objectives.
Could Social Media ROI nirvana be any more peaceful?
This post is Terametric’s Twitter ROI Series leading up to the December 9, 2010 Webinar: How-To measure and improve your Twitter Marketing ROI with Jim Sterne and Kyle Lacy.
Twitter, is quickly evolving into a critical marketing channel to engage customers beyond the one-way broadcast of traditional media. Twitter marketers, however, still measure their success with traditional measures. They conduct marketing activities in the medium and then they measure the success of marketing activity by the number of completed goals such as increase in revenue, customer satisfaction, brand visibility, and brand awareness.
Regardless of how marketers currently measure their Twitter Marketing activity, success or failure, there are a few simple, yet critical uses of the Twitter channel that will always reduce and minimize Twitter Marketing ROI. Below are the top ways that one can fail to maximize ROI impact on Twitter, without even trying.
1. Don’t Complete Your Human Presence on Twitter.
A simple way to be outcompeted and outmaneuvered on Twitter is to not make the required investment in delivering a fully human and completed Twitter profile. Here are the areas where you can, guaranteed, reduce your Twitter marketing ROI impact.
• Don’t create a complete a full Twitter BIO
• Don’t create a professional and personable profile Image that humanizes your account
• Maximize use of logos and brands instead of humans
• Don’t include your accurate geography location in your profile
2. Don’t tweet consistently and relevantly on your Twitter Channel
Industry authority or influence can be easily measured in two qualitative measures. Either you are tweeting about the industry or the industry is tweeting about you. If you’re not #1 in your industry and you’re not tweeting about the industry, then chances are that your tweeting impact will be low. Authority in communication can maximize the ROI objectives of your Twitter account. Here are the areas where you can, guaranteed, reduce your Twitter Marketing influence and resulting ROI:
• Don’t reach out to influencers on the themes and topics of your industry
• Don’t generate immense positive sentiment around your tweet topics and themes
• Don’t generate weekly tweet volume and quality to match your critical competitors
Most Social Media Managers are trying to maximize their Twitter marketing ROI. As such, it may be easier to avoid these pitfalls to ensure that the Twitter channel performs optimally in its goal to deliver marketing wins and increased customer engagement.
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