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, and Wendy Troupe.

Last week, we covered the top 3 critical inbound Twitter metrics. We started with definitions of inbound and outbound twitter marketing activities. The definitions of inbound and outbound Twitter metrics, as per last week’s post, in case you missed it, are listed below:

Inbound metric is a metric that measures the customer responses to your Social Media marketing or your brand’s impacting the Twitter channel.

Outbound metric is any metric that measures the marketing activities you must execute within the Twitter channel. This is your investment cost.

As a follow up, let’s analyze the top 3 critical outbound Twitter metrics.

Source: www.blog.perksconsulting.com

1. Number of lists
“Lists” on Twitter is the equivalent of “Groups” on Facebook. It is an easy way to group those users you follow on Twitter. Lists enable you to view curated Twitter streams of the latest tweets from a particular group of users. You can keep up with relevant tweets, and conversely, it allows the Twitter-verse to keep up with you. You can be on someone’s Twitter list, even if they don’t follow you. Adding lists curates and segments conversations, thereby making it easier to manage conversations and topics.

2. Referencing a hashtag and/or bit.ly?
Twitter Hashtags are a commonly used to add context to your tweets. Referencing tweets with hashtags makes it easier for Twitter users to search and to follow specific topics. Companies and brands should define unique, yet short, hashtags for easy search and referencing. Wendy Troupe recommends that Twitter marketers use a site like TagDef to provide information about what specific hashtags represent and how Twitter users may search for them. Bit.ly is a service that creates shortened URLS coupled to real-time link tracking. Bit.ly allows users to view complete traffic data for their links. This information is invaluable. Using hashtags and bit.ly are critical to measure performance of Twitter inbound marketing activities such retweets and click-stream traffic.

3. Sentiment of tweets
What kind of sentiment are you creating on Twitter? Sentiment analysis varies depending on whom you ask. However, most sentiment analysis breaks down tweet content into positive, negative, or neutral sentiment. All Twitter users desire to maximize the amount of positive sentiment generated and measured. Some ways of managing sentiment successfully are:
• Engage often with customers and followers to generate stronger and deeper relationships
• Retweet tweets with positive sentiment to amplify positive word of mouth around relevant topics
• Set up a reactive program for both positive and negative tweets

Now that we have covered both critical inbound and outbound metrics, are we missing any others? Feel free to share in the comments below if you think we have missed out on any other critical Twitter metrics that are critical to maximizing Twitter marketing ROI.