For a given period of time, it’s simply your total retweets (given by Klout, see yesterday’s post) divided by your total number of followers.

Business Goal

This metric points to is how much you are thought of as a thought leader from your follower base. Becoming a thought leader has benefits for virtually any business because it has the effect of gaining the trust of your customers. As this number increases, it shows that you are increasing in thought leadership, as more and more of your followers are retweeting (you can think of it as syndicating) your thoughts, and recognize them as useful or authoritative.

How do you increase it?

Two ways – One, target your audience better. If the people following you are really interested in your business, then it’s easier for them to pay attention to what you say. Two, work at refining your message and the delivery of message. How you say something, and the medium you use, can have a big effect. Do your followers respond better to videos, podcasts, whitepapers, case studies, blog posts, or photos? Do some experimentation to find out what works best for your audience, and link to those things from Twitter.

It’s just the total number of times that your tweets have been retweeted in a given time period. You can get this one from Klout as well.

Business Goal
If it’s important for you to reach as many people as possible with your message, this is a good metric. It’s generally good for B2C firms, as the more people that know about your product the more customers you receive. The metric shows message amplification – as the number of retweets goes up, the amount of people that see your message increases dramatically. Since the average Twitter user has a few hundred followers, retweets have the potential of reaching a lot of people. It also shows how interesting or easily sharable your message is, indicated how likely it is to spread by other mediums besides Twitter. Measuring the retweets for specific tweets would also be useful to test and try which messages are the most sticky (for this you can use tweetmeme).

How do you increase it?
You increase this by sending out messages that are useful, valuable, interesting, and targeted to your followers. Another factor is your authority – if people recognize you as a leader in your industry, they are more likely to trust your tweets and retweet them. Retweeting other people’s material (participating in the community) will also help increase your retweets by the law or reciprocity.

Twitter Engagement Metric

Business Goal

Follower mention is an excellent engagement metric. It indicates to what extent you are connecting with other users on twitter and developing real relationships. It can also be indicative of how valuable your tweets and content are to others, as the more value they see in what you have to say, the more likely they are to mention you.

If one of your business goals is to become a thought leader in a certain niche, or to build a larger community base of people that trust you and that you can do business with, then this is a good metric to follow. This is a valuable goal for almost any company, but especially for B2B firms, as sales in that situation requires good relationships and high levels of trust. To be sure if this metric is for you, you should probably ask yourself the following questions:

Is my target audience on Twitter? (try checking Twellow or Twitter search)
Are the people that influence my clients and customers on Twitter?
Is building a strong online community important for my businesses success?
Could I find potential partnerships or other opportunities from a Twitter community?
Is user engagement an important part of my brand and business?

How do you increase it?
You increase this metric by being social and helpful to others. An important part of this is reading other people’s tweets so you know who they are and what they are thinking about. Then you can start conversations with them, mention them, ask them questions, retweet them, give referrals to them, etc. Common courtesy also goes a long way; if someone else’s tweets are useful to you, let them know and thank them. And if you are mentioned in that way, be sure and let them know their mention of you is appreciated.

This post seeks to summarize what has already been discussed in this series, and to help you put it all into an actionable, executable plan that will bring more business benefits by using Twitter. The post has been summarized into three steps.

Create a specific action plan

A sound plan is created as you answer the following questions:

How much time do I have to spend on Twitter?
What are the business outcomes I want to achieve from Twitter?

Once you know your time constraints and your purpose, set up the plan by asking the next set of questions:

Who should I follow to accomplish my outcomes?
Who do I need in my community to accomplish my outcomes?
What do I need to Tweet about in order to be helpful to my audience?
What types of questions am I able to answer?
What are the problems I can help solve?

Once you have this outlined, you can set to work using the tools and methods previously outlined in this series.

Summarize all data metrics into actionable insights

Although many people can come up with a good action plan, many people falter in the analysis aspect that goes along with that plan. There are two dangers: not doing any analysis, and doing too much analysis.

Not doing any analysis (flying blind)

Some people will tell you that looking at the numbers and focusing on the analytics is a waste of time, and that it would be better to put your effort into actually running your business and being present more often on Twitter. This is true to an extent, but if you never look at the data you are missing valuable, actionable insights that help you use Twitter to connect with your audience.

Doing too much analysis (analysis paralysis)

On the other end of the spectrum, some focus so much on the numbers and ratios that they forget that we are dealing with human beings when we talk about Twitter. The most important part of Twitter is the human relationships that are developed that allow business to flourish. Focusing solely on getting your Twitter metrics to raise means you are missing the point.

The Happy Medium

The right amount of analysis is the amount that gives you valuable, actionable, human insights in a minimal amount of time. That way you can spend your time implementing the insights that you find. In order to accomplish this, choose two are three metrics that will give you the most valuable insight, and continually track these two or three. Here are a few suggestions:

Retweet Ratio: This tells you how valuable your tweets are to your community – the higher the ratio, the more helpful you are being. The more valuable you are to your Twitter community, the more business you will receive from them. Take it a step further and look specifically at what is being retweeted so you get an idea of how your community operates, and what they find useful. (This can be found under the ‘content’ tab in Klout)

Link Clicks: Same idea as the suggestion above; if you share a lot of links with your community, look to see which links people are clicking and therefore which ones catch their attention and are helpful to them. This can also be found under the content tab in Klout.

Unique @ Senders: This is a better metric to track than just ‘followers’. This metric looks at those followers that find your tweets engaging enough that they will tweet to you directly or mention you in their tweets. This number shows you how many people truly find your Twitter presence useful, and with whom you can form valuable relationships. This is also found in Klout.

Hopefully you get the idea – track metrics that reflect real human engagement, help you understand how your community operates and what they find useful, and that help you tailor your tweets for your community.

Execute your plan

In order to execute your plan for using Twitter strategically, it’s the simple things that matter. Write down the answers to the questions above when you create your plan. Write down how much time per day you can use Twitter actively and stick to it. Track your metrics, and write down any changes you are making to your strategy according to the insights you get from the metrics.

The main point – write down what you will do, how long you have to do it, what you change as you go, and what works and what doesn’t. Keep this document updated as you use Twitter, refer to it, and follow it.

What are your thoughts on a successful Twitter action plan?

This post seeks to answer two Twitter questions: How to improve the quality of tweets for better ROI, and how to track the improvement?

Improving Tweet Quality

Following a few simple guidelines will help the reader improve the quality of their tweets:

Define Your Objectives – First you must ask yourself, why are you using Twitter? What do you want the result to be from using your time to post tweets? Are you trying to increase awareness of your product or service? Increase the trust that potential customers or clients have in you? Increase your ability to handle customer service issues? Become a thought leader in your industry? All of these things can affect your bottom line in various ways. So before you try to improve the effectiveness of your tweets, do some thinking and decide what exactly an ‘effective’ tweet will bring to you or your organization.

Keep Tweets Relevant – Whatever you decide for your objectives, keep your tweets in line with that objective. With each tweet, ask yourself if that specific tweet will help you realize one of your goals, and how it will do that. If you can’t answer the how, then you might want to rethink the tweet.

Help Others Be Successful – Whatever your objectives may be, this is one thing that will always help your tweet quality increase. Here are a few suggestions on how to help others be successful through Twitter:

Search for people posting questions you can answer, and answer them.
Post links to interesting and useful content for audience you are targeting.
Post events or event reminders that will be useful to your target audience.
Be specific in your tweet about why the link or event will be useful to your audience.

Tracking Twitter Quality

This is the most important part of improving your Twitter quality, because here you discover what works for your target audience and what doesn’t. Using Tweeteffect you can see what posts gained you more followers, and what posts lost you followers. Using Google Analytics, you can see which posts brought in the most traffic to your website. Looking at retweet numbers, you can see which posts your followers particularly enjoyed. These are three good ways to see what types of posts are working for your audience, so that you can tweet more of them in the future.

In the next post, we will focus on how to combine all the data you can gather on Twitter into a dashboard so that it’s easy to see and take action on.

Twitter ROI Definition

In speaking about how to improve our Twitter marketing ROI, first we must decide what we mean when we say investment and return when we discuss Twitter.

Investment, as Twitter is a free online service, should be defined as the time we spend using Twitter. When possible, a monetary value should be placed on this amount of time, reflecting how much value could be made in spending the time doing other activities.

Return should always be defined as how much bottom line revenue you get from the investment. In the case of Twitter, these bottom line returns will have to be extrapolated from such metrics as increased traffic to site, increased follower base, increased influence base, etc. We must calculate how much revenue is generated by these metrics increasing, and use this in our ROI calculation.

Improving Twitter ROI

Having now defined what we mean by ROI, there are two ways that it can be increased – reducing investment or increasing return. It common terms, what we want to do is increase our Twitter proficiency (using it faster) and quality (getting the most out of our tweets). This post will focus on increasing proficiency.

Increasing proficiency in Twitter can be broken down into two categories: Learning and using the best tools to make Tweeting quick and easy, and finding out how much time is optimal to spend on Twitter.

Learning and Using the Best Tools

First, learning and using the best tools. Although there are many tools and services that exist to help you use Twitter, I have included four here to keep things simple. When used together, these tools are fairly comprehensive in scope and can give you the abilities and information you need to effectively use Twitter. Become acquainted a proficient with these tools to make Twitter quick and easy. We will discuss further how to use the information from these tools for analytics in the next post.

Hootsuite – A browser client that allows you to track all of your Twitter activity. I’ll let you see their site for all the features, but basically this tool is used to actually do your tweeting and track others tweets.

Twitoaster – Use this to see complete conversation threads and get the context of tweets. This tool also has a nice search function so you can look for relevant topics and conversations you might want to participate in.

Klout – See previous post for more details, but this has a nice range of analytics for your tweets.

TweetEffect – Also see previous post, but this is a good tool to see what kind of tweets give positive results and what ones give negative results.

Optimal Time to Spend on Twitter

Secondly, you must find out how much time is optimal for you to spend on Twitter. If you are spending 10 minutes a week, you’re probably not doing enough to generate any kind of revenue. On the flip side, spending hours a day and filling twitter with a surplus of your tweets can also be harmful (not only because you lose time, but because you lose followers).

The best way I have found to do this is to try out different systems. For one month, you can give yourself 10-15 minutes daily to use Twitter, and track your success. Next month, try upping the time to about 30 minutes a day, and compare that to the previous month. Do as many iterations of this as you need to find your optimal time.

Because different business profit in different ways by using Twitter, the only way to get an optimal time is to try it and test it. However, when you look at each month and compare, just remember to keep in mind that there are other factors as well determining your success or failure (such as Tweet quality). The next post will discuss the analytics of discovering tweet quality and comparing month to month success levels.

Anyone have further suggestions on how to optimize your time spent on Twitter?

First, I apologize for the delay on getting this next post up. I’ve been sick for a week, which took me down for the count more than I wanted. But I’m back, so let’s do this.

We’ve been looking at various Twitter metrics to really try and turn your twitter usage into something measurable, trackable, and improvable. The idea is to improve marketing ROI.

In today’s post, I’m going share some recommendations regarding the best analytical tools available for Twitter right now, as well as see what type of insight can be gathered from them.

Klout.net
Klout measures personal influence. In Klout’s own words: “Klout allows you to track the impact of your opinions, links and recommendations across your social graph. We collect data about the content you create, how people interact with that content and the size and composition of your network. From there, we analyze the data to find indicators of influence and then provide you with innovative tools to interact with and interpret the data.”

This is the best tool I’ve yet seen, supplying the most data and the best visualizations, as well as opportunities to import into Excel (albeit through a copy and paste) for my own data manipulations. They measure some 25 metrics.

TwitterFriends
TwitterFriends operates on the assumption that there are a lot of people we follow on Twitter that don’t create a ton of value for us, but that buried within those contacts are real gems. TwitterFriends helps you identify who those people are (the relevant net). These are people that you talk with frequently or that consistently feed you great content.

19 twitter metrics are tracked, most of which are completely useless, but a few which have value, namely:
• Numbers of relevant/valuable contacts in your Twitter fanbase
• Conversation Quotient (CQ)
o States how many tweets are @replies
o Shows the extent you are using Twitter to have conversations with others
o Good metric for tracking relationship management
o Average CQ is 25.4% (this can be used as a benchmark)
• Link Quotient
o States how many tweets included links
o Good metric for tracking information management

TweetEffect (attempts to measure how individual tweets affect follower counts)
This is an interesting idea and one with some potential if combined with other metrics. It assumes that what you tweet will affect followers within five minutes. The service analyzes your last 200 tweets and examines whether you gained or lost two or more followers within 5 minutes of the tweet.
Tweet Stats (measures your Twitter activity)
This is an interesting program because it tracks activity for any user and presents it in an intuitive graphical format. It shows the following information:
• A month-by-month tweet log since you joined Twitter
• A daily breakdown of tweet volume
• An hourly breakdown of tweets by hour
• Hourly activity over a 7 day period
• @replies report
• Popular words in your tweets

What I don’t like here is the fact that I can’t get the data for myself. No data export, no CSV. I had to input this stuff manually.

Tweetmeme (measures trends by link retweets)
Tweetmeme is a link aggregator service, collecting all the tweeted links in the Twitterverse and classifying them for searchability. It makes sense of a bunch of 140-character nonsense. Tweetmeme enables you to track your industry and competitors, as well as trends in general, and see what topics are of the most interest to people, as measured by the number of times they get retweeted. They also have some plugins and widgets which I find useful.

Twitalyzer (attempts to measure the strength of your Twitter efforts)
This service was created by the guy who wrote Web Analytics: Demystified. He’s created a tool that measures 5 metrics:
• Influence (how much do you impact the conversation)
o As measured by numbers of followers, number of times you are retweeted, number of times you retweet others, number of conversations you have with others, and number of tweets in general in a given period
• Signal-to-Noise (the amount of valuable content you share)
o As measured by references to others you make (@conversations), imbedded URL links, hastags (#topic), and number of times you retweet someone else. These elements are summed and then divided by the number of total tweets in a period.
• Generosity (the amount you retweet others)
• Velocity (the frequency that you update on Twitter)
• Clout (number of times you are cited in other people’s tweets)

The service is free and easy, but I don’t like how it aggregates information into pre-determined metrics. I have no ability to analyze the data or manipulate it for insights. Of any of the tools, I find this one to be the least useful.

Visualizing Twitter Analytics
I used Hubspot as a case study. They’re famous for their grader tools as well as their search optimization software. I culled all the useful data I could from the above programs and threw it into a spreadsheet to visualize it. This is the best I could create. I’d really like to see more of a Google Analytics interface created with these Twitter analytics apps; it would make the analysis much easier. As it is, this is a decent at-a-glance dashboard. Let me know your thoughts. How would you change it? What would you add or take away?

Last post discussed some potential Twitter metrics. This post seeks to tie your twitter ratios into blog success. Answer the following questions with the following metrics:

How often do I post on Twitter? (substitute blogs for tweets for blogging)
o Measures whether or not you are worth following, subscribing to, or listening to
o # Tweets / # Months (or weeks) Tweeting (Thanks Avinash!)

How strong are my calls-to-action in my Tweets?
o # of @ Replies / Total Tweets (or total tweets with a call to action)

How much of the information I share is being absorbed?
o This metric is a little tricky. The average human reads about 200 words a minute, studies show. Assuming it is a link to your own site, compute the following ratios:
Absorption Ratio (minutes to read) = # Words in blog post (or whatever) / 250
Use the clickthrough ratio in conjunction with this metric as well as your analytics stats to see what the average time spent on your site is. This will help you understand how much information you share is actually being absorbed.

Is my audience growing?
o Trended stats of Twitter followers, blog readership, blog subscribers.

What brings people to my site?
o Use the traffic report to analyze keywords bringing in traffic from Twitter in Google Analytics

How can I tie my information into trendy topics?
o Use Google Trends
o Since a lot of people search for trendy topics, like Paris Hilton, you have the opportunity to potentially grab more followers by tying into a trendy topic that gets a lot of searches

That wraps this subset up of our overall series on Twitter and Marketing Analytics. In the next post, we will discuss which tools can be used and combined to track the above Twitter metrics. What metrics would you add or change? Let us know. We want this to be a discussion.

*Note: I’m travelling on business this week, so it’s a little harder to pull together the graphics, so bear with me. I’ll have Part 3 up of this series later this week.

Though there is a metric to measure almost anything, the goal is to avoid analysis paralysis. As marketers, we want to focus on what is critical to our success and measure only those things. By tracking those metrics over time, we can see if we have moved the needle closer to our goal or not.

There are various programs out there claiming to have robust Twitter metrics, like the ones featured below. However, we fail to see how these apply to anything. They don’t tie into anything specific.

Tied Back to Goals
Critical success factors can generally be classified under three questions:
• Does it build revenue?
• Does it improve efficiency/reduce costs?
• Does it build brand loyalty?

Ask yourself why you tweet. Because all of your metrics need to tie back somehow to one of those overarching goals above. Otherwise, you will end up like these guys… Looking forward to Flutter Eyes, for sure.

Twitter Analytics
For the rest of us that are trying to get real value out of Twitter, it’s time to incorporate Twitter analytics. Twitter analytics takes the existing tools and uses them to track metrics that are tied back to your marketing goals.

Last time I listed several ways businesses are using Twitter. This post is going to create measurable metrics for those as much as possible.

Drive targeted website traffic
o Tweet Conversion Ratio = # Site Visits from Twitter / # of Twitter Followers (or new Twitter followers)

Build brand loyalty and buzz
o Twitter Friends = # of Twitter Followers over time (watch for upward trends)
o Retweet Ratio = # of Retweets / Total Tweets in a given period of time

Obtain opinion data from a diverse group, perform simple market research
o Reply Ratio = # Replies / Total Tweets in a given period of time

Direct people’s attention to good information or valuable content
o Clickthrough Ratio = (# Clickthroughs per link) / Total Tweets with Links

Track memes and trends
o # of Tweets in given period vs. Google Trends graph of specific subject/topic

Gather competitive intelligence
o Competitive Intelligence Ratio = # of Tweets about Competitors / Total Tweets about Industry
e.g. The number of mentions Avinash gets vs. Omniture vs. web analytics in general

Manage customer service, create a brand index
o (Positive Tweets – Negative Tweets) / Total Tweets

Create a tribe
o # of New Followers per Tweet

Each of these ratios will give you a percentage. The higher the percentage, the better. If percentages are low, it’s time to experiment and try something new. Perhaps posting more frequently, or maybe less frequently, or adjusting the content you share, or the way you present information, will help you improve your ratios.

Try some of these and let us know what you think. Do they work for you? Would you like to see other metrics developed? Do you have other metrics to contribute? We want your thoughts.

We’ll have more on these metrics tomorrow and more on the tools to track and visualize twitter analytics later this week.

This is the first post in a series of 7 focused on applying marketing analytics to Twitter. Using Twitter analytics can help businesses track brand advocates and detractors, follow conversation topics and trends, measure visitors to your site from Twitter, and improve ROI.

Much has been said about the business benefits of using Twitter. Some of the benefits include:
• Track memes and trends
• Perform simple market research (heck, we got started because we saw a need for marketing analytics while using Twitter)
• Obtain opinion data from a diverse group
• Find breaking news
• Direct people’s attention to good information or valuable content
• Bring people together
• Build brand awareness and buzz
• Manage customer service
• Use negative feedback to improve offerings without total brand destruction
• Create business opportunities or generate referrals
• Gather competitive intelligence
• Drive targeted website traffic
• Create a tribe (watch Seth’s podcast)

See Chris Brogan’s comprehensive list of Twitter uses and how-tos.

Despite the obvious benefits of using Twitter, without a way to track, measure and improve, Twitter can quickly become Fritter, the frivolous and unwise waste of one’s time. By incorporating twitter analytics into your strategy, you can maximize your time spent and marketing ROI. This is the kickoff post of another 7 part series of posts on our marketing analytics blog.

The next several posts will cover the following topics:
• Why Twitter Analytics? (this post)
• What Twitter Metrics Should I Use?
• How Do I Measure These Metrics?
• How Do I Measure and Improve my Twitter Marketing ROI with Analytics?
• How Do I Summarize All Information into an Actionable Dashboard?
• How Do I Create & Execute a Specific Action Plan for Improvement?

Tune in over the next few days for the next posts. Let us know if this series is valuable or if you would like to see other topics included. Thanks for reading!