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Posts Tagged ‘Social Media Tools’

Twitter measurement tools: Can we get serious? Like really serious?

Posted in Twitter ROI by Taariq Lewis on February 1st, 2011

It’s time to take the gloves off and get very real about what it takes to execute quality Social Media metrics that is actionable and usable for marketing, advertising, and public relations executive struggling to understand and optimize the impact of their owned media performance.

Aren’t you tired of talking about the mysterious “score” that everyone knows, but no one truly understands? Unfortunately, most social media metrics tools are black boxes. Neither you nor I can tell exactly how they work to determine Twitter marketing and other Social Media ROI or effectiveness of our marketing campaigns. I argue that this unclear approach to measurement is not only unscientific, because it’s untestable, but it’s worth much less than advertised. As such, I’m putting a challenge down to all the Social Media metric firms. Come clean and come open! Why should your customers be left in the dark?

A simple way to measure the quality of your Twitter measurement and analytics tool is to ask this question: When measuring Twitter marketing effectiveness, does your current Social Media measurement tool capture all the tweeting activity of all your Twitter followers and all your competitors and their followers? If it does capture follower activity, how much activity will it measure? Is the sample size scientifically robust?

Below is a simple table from a Terametric Optimizer for Twitter extraction of a sample Small, Medium, Business (SMB’s) company Twitter Handles and the number of data points needed to calculate a baseline measurement of Twitter influence and marketing impact during a marketing campaign.

The table below consists of the Twitter universe of a successful services company. It has 3 Twitter handles and 3 of the company’s biggest competitors.

If our marketing manager is measuring the effectiveness of her campaign, she needs to track the following in real-time:

1) The impact of her tweeting campaign across her community of Twitter followers and her friends on Twitter.

2) The impact of her competitor tweets across their community of Twitter followers and their friends during her campaign.

Why? Well, who cares if she tweets just to her friends and customers in a highly competitive market where your competitors are gaining your customer attention as well? How scientific is that? I mean, really? Our marketing manager needs to know how well she is doing, daily, and how well her industry is doing to influence her market. Is your Twitter measurement product only asking you for you for just your Twitter handle or only one Twitter handler at a time? Do you see how incomplete your Twitter marketing picture is and how you’re paying for that tool in precious time and budget, as well?

To collect the full and holistic view of her Twitter marketing campaign and industry, our marketing manager needs to analyze no less than 51,000 tweets, measured across 34,112 handles, each day for the period of her campaign. Why? Because she wants a robust measurement of her activity and the most robust population sample of her industry. She wants as complete and as scientific an approach as possible. She also wants to know how her competitors are winning clicks and RTs so she can take advantage of their best practices to increase her conversions and marketing ROI. She’s serious. Really.

Are you still plugging away one Twitter handle at a time into your favorite Twitter measurement tool? Does your tool vendor actually come clean and tell you how they make their measurements or are you supposed to just trust that their dataset is sufficient? Share with us what’s missing and how Twitter measurement tools need to be better for you, today. Or better, why don’t you register for a limited-invite, Free Trial, today?

Tags: Influence, Social Media Tools, tweets, twitter, Twitter followers, Twitter ROI
Posted in Twitter ROI | View Comments

3 reasons why SMBs fail to achieve positive ROI with Twitter Marketing

Posted in Social Media ROI, Twitter ROI by Taariq Lewis on December 27th, 2010

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.

Tags: Influence, marketing measurement, marketing roi, Social Media ROI, Social Media Strategy, Social Media Tools, tweets, twitter, Twitter ROI
Posted in Social Media ROI, Twitter ROI | View Comments

3 simple Twitter marketing rules that still maximize ROI

Posted in Social Media ROI, Twitter ROI by Taariq Lewis on December 21st, 2010

Kyle Lacy, Principal of MindFrame and author of the book, “Twitter Marketing for Dummies”and Terametric webinar panelist on “How to Measure and Maximize Twitter marketing ROI,”shared the ratio for effective balance of Twitter conversation, marketing, and sharing for social media. These were: Share your content, share partner content and share industry content evenly. We also adopted these three rules into another simple model that you can explain to your boss and that should make any Twitter campaign successful.

1: Promote
This is why we campaign on Twitter and why we need to show maximum business return on social media investment dollars. However, if promoting on Twitter sounds like just “broadcast your ad here” you’re in the wrong medium. Promoting content on Twitter means that social media managers should promote content and opportunities on Twitter that are unique, special, and hard to acquire on other channels. Since Twitter is real-time communication, organizations should promote call to actions that incentivize real-time response. Twitter promotions should be treated as hard-to-get, limited, and requiring ongoing monitoring. Old offers and promotions that are available elsewhere decrease the value of a Twitter promotion as a “must-have” or “must-click”.

2: Share
Twitter is an effective way to build authority by sharing highly relevant partner content. Social Media research on how individuals consume data show that news channels are considered the most authoritative of web channels for information. Sharing relevant, fresh, time-sensitive partner content should increase perceived authority and influence. However, sharing for sharing sake is not an effective approach to business marketing on Twitter. Sharing should be relevant to your audience and their biggest information needs. Sharing should also be free of any purchase obligation.

3: Converse
Maintaining ongoing Twitter engagement without self-reflective tweets is not hard if social media marketers engage in relevant conversations. Conversations can be started by discussing relevant industry content is an effective way to stay in touch with industry and the community. If the industry is not talking about your company, are you talking about the industry? Conversations require an exchange of information and talking about the industry is an easy way to launch that exchange.

Conclusion:
Make sure your boss understands that all three are needed for any Twitter campaign to be successful. If these simple rules were easy, everyone would be doing it perfectly. However, it’s hard to maintain an even balance between these three goals. Before you launch your next Twitter campaign, check your Twitter toolbox and identify any tools that make it easy to measure and maximize how best to promote, share, and converse.

Tags: marketing measurement, Social Media Measurement, Social Media Tools, tweets, twitter, Twitter ROI
Posted in Social Media ROI, Twitter ROI | View Comments

3 ways to tell if you’re a Social Media Chart Porn Addict

Posted in Social Media ROI by Taariq Lewis on November 10th, 2010

I’m with you. I do it myself. I am addicted to my Social Media charts. I fire up my latest social media channel measurement tool. It’s awesome because once I enter my Twitter handle or login via Facebook, I have access to great charts. However, without a clear understanding of what exactly we’re trying to measure and why, it’s my view that most social media charts and graphs fail to maximize marketing ROI and are no more than cheap, chart porn. We like to watch it and we love it when it’s free. So here are my favorite 3 ways to tell if you’re a Social Media Chart Porn Addict.

1. Your get pleasure seeing your Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn numbers go up each time you check your favorite Social Media analytics tool. Each week, we’re tweeting as hard as we can so we can add more followers who we hope must be listening. If we can just keep it going, our Social Media impact will increase. How can you not get excited about that? Each new follower tick upwards is a big turn-on.

Source: http://twittercounter.com/taariqlewis

2. You get a little depressed when your Twitter numbers go down. Maybe you couldn’t keep it up like you did, last week. Maybe it was your last intense and heated Tweetup turned a few good folks off. If we’re always engaged, how come folks lose interest? Were we just off message?

Source: http://twittercounter.com/taariqlewis

3. You and I have Klout envy. There’s always someone else above you with bigger Social Media influence, more Social Media energy and even great positive sentiment. These superstars must be raking in so much more returns on their investment in Social Media channels, like Twitter, they are the people to imitate!

Source: http://www.klout.com

There is a way to cure the Social Media Chart porn addiction! Take action on your Social Media strategy. Stop chasing the Social Media charts and start maximizing your inbound impact with a roadmap of outbound engagement.

1. Identify your inbound objectives
2. Identify your outbound resources
3. Set a trial start and stop date
4. Execute your Social Media Campaign
5. Measure your resulting performance against your expected or desired performance
6. Optimize your outbound activities and run your campaign again.

That’s it. Now we can get on our with our social media lives!

Tags: Klout, marketing measurement, marketing metrics, Social Media Analytics, Social Media Measurement, Social Media Tools, twitter, Twitter followers, usage stats
Posted in Social Media ROI | View Comments

The World’s Largest Source of Target Data

Posted in Strategy and Analysis by Matt Carter on February 21st, 2010

Wendy Troupe and I were speaking to Nathan Gilliatt this morning about the nature of analysis, measurement and social media. The conversation ranged across a variety of topics: from his recent and very successful AnalyticsCamp in Chapel Hill to the occurrence measurement silos (we all agreed, by the way, that measurement silos stink and rob you of true cross-channel, big-picture insight). During that conversation, Nathan said something that stopped the coffee cup halfway to my lips. It was eloquent, simple and yet, profound:

“[If you set aside the corporate desire for engagement], Social Media becomes a set of really powerful, publicly-available, data points.” (paraphrasing, Nathan said it much better)

Social Media is an almost limitless source of data about the habits, lifestyles, opinions, relationships and behaviors of an incredibly diverse pool of people. According to a post by Brian Solis, covering the latest Neilsen report, that pool is growing at an amazing rate:

Global Visitors to Social Networking Sites

More than 100 million people have swelled the ranks of social media visitors in just two short years. Today, the total pool of individuals stands at more than 300 million strong, roughly the equivalent of every man, woman and child in the United States. It should be noted, however, that less than half of the social media citizens (142,052,000) are actually from the United States.

Not only does Social Media provide detailed data on an incredibly diverse group of people, it may also eliminate what Quantum Theorists like to call, “observation contamination”:

“One of the most bizarre premises of quantum theory, which has long fascinated philosophers and physicists alike, states that by the very act of watching, the observer affects the observed reality.”

In a recent post, we explored this tenet of Quantum Theory and applied it to the Social Media space:

“This premise has long cast a tiny shadow of invalidating doubt on all manner of research. Primary marketing research like focus groups, usability testing, interviews and even surveys are no exception. The simple act of observing an action or response can to some degree skew that action or response.

Yet, today, an array of Social Media tools provides marketers and brand managers with an unprecedented way to access the actions and conversations of a particular group in such a way that the group isn’t cognizant of the observation.”

Couple this amazing pool of data with the elimination of “observation contamination” and those companies with the right analysis tools have an opportunity to learn about their targets in unprecedented ways.

In yesterday’s #SocialMedia Chat, Ken Burbary discussed how Social Media is changing the nature of target segmentation. Ken did a great job of providing an interesting framework and guiding the discussion when needed. Participants all agreed that Social Media doesn’t just change the nature of target segmentation, it forces it and our notions of what’s knowable to evolve.

Our understanding of the target is no longer limited to static demographic, psychographic and geographic data. We can now study their interactions, relationships, use of platforms, personalities, preferences, habits and behaviors in real time. We can literally watch them unfold before our very eyes.

If your company isn’t leveraging the power of social media to study the target, you can bet your competitors are. Social Media analysis should be a part of the customer study in every strategic marketing plan. If your company is like many, you may need to shift dollars from another marketing program to fund social media’s inclusion. If so, maybe it should come from your marketing research budget?