Twitter is a great social media platform to engage with current clients, potential customers, and industry leaders by both creating and curating valuable content.
As a Twitter account manager, you put in time and effort to maintain your Twitter stream. Therefore, it’s important to evaluate what sorts of return you’re getting for your hard work.
Here are 6 easy ways to measure the effectiveness of your Twitter strategy.
Follower Growth
Keep track of how many new followers you have at the end of each day, week, or month. You can use this number over a series of weeks and calculate the average number of followers per week. You can also use this information to see what kinds of tweets encourage people to follow you and analyze the type of followers you’re attracting. Be sure to tweak your efforts to ensure you’re attracting the followers that are likely to engage with your brand.
Retweets & Mentions
These metrics indicate the levels of engagement by other Twitter users with your brand. If you start to see a pattern of certain people consistently retweeting your content, consider reaching out to them with a direct message. This feature allows you to narrow down you focus to people who are genuinely interested in learning more about your brand.
Twitter Analytics
There are a number of tools available that can give you an in-depth analysis of your Twitter account. Some of these are paid services such Beevolve and Nutshell Mail, while others are free, such as TweetStats and Twitter Counter. One thing to consider before you decide which Twitter analytics tool to use is the necessary time commitment required for proper analysis.
Referrals from Google Analytics
Ultimately, Twitter is a gateway and should be the opening act to your website’s main attraction. Connect your Google Analytics tool with your Twitter stream to see how your activity on Twitter is influencing your website traffic. This should help you quickly determine whether your efforts are worthwhile.
Inbound Leads
Analyze how and where your inbound leads are coming from. When you get an inbound lead ask them how they came to know about your services. If it originated from Twitter, you will know that your efforts are paying off. To ensure that Twitter is a contributing inbound marketing tool, be sure to consistently tweet links to your calls-to-action.
Opportunities Closed
Taking your online connections and turning them into offline opportunities is crucial. Trace back your closed opportunities to see if any of them originated from a connection made on Twitter. This will help you analyse the direct effect that social media marketing has upon your bottom line.
Twitter can lead to great opportunities when utilized and measured effectively. It doesn’t take much time or effort to organize your account. Typically at VA Partners we spend 0.5 hours a day analyzing the results of our Twitter efforts and level of Twitter success. For more Twitter tips, download our white paper, “Getting Started with Twitter”.
