What kind of return on investment can I see with Twitter implementation?
- accountant
Measuring your return is one of the most overlooked aspects of a Twitter strategy (or any social media strategy, for that matter). It’s very easy to fall into the trap of spending a ton of time fiddling around with Twitter. After all: it’s fun. That’s why you need to spend your time in disciplined pursuit of your business objectives. Defining those objectives is the first step to measuring your ROI. Here are some possible goals you may have, and how to measure your success with each one.
1.) Driving website traffic. This is the easiest goal to measure. Check your server logs. If you posts a tweet with a link to one of your pages, how many people visited that page in the next 24 hours? Was that more or less than most other days?
2.) Positioning yourself as an expert. Establishing expertise is hard to measure on Twitter or anywhere else, but you do have some tools. The number of people following you is a rudimentary metric of your perceived expertise. The number of times you are retweeted can be a good indicator, since it demonstrates that people valued your content enough to pass it along to their followers.
3.) Industry research. When you’re following your industry, your competition, or just mentions of your own brand, the measure of your success is going to be the information that you dig up. What did you find? How long would it have taken to find the same information on a traditional web search? Would you have found it at all? Is the article date relevant to today? Most of Twitter’s information is very recent results.
4.) Networking. The metric here is how many people you meet and how well you can help each other. (The geotargeting in Twitter’s search makes it very easy to find people locally that are talking about topics you want to comment on.)
5.) Finding clients. Another very easy metric. Just measure Twitter like any other lead source in your sales pipeline (and if you use Salesforce they have a Twitter tab in which to monitor your activity). When you do a search for people that are experiencing the pain your product or service addresses, you can send them a tweet and think of them as a lead. Go through your conversion funnel and just look at what the numbers are telling you.
That’s your return. In all of these cases the investment is your time. To be successful with Twitter you must allocate the time to it, but you should be careful not to go over that time. Make a schedule and stick to it. You’ll need to refine a schedule that makes sense to you, but a good place to start is 30-60 minutes a day. Try that for a while and see what kind of return you’re getting.
Anyone getting a return on their Twitter investment that’s either more or less than they expected?
Tags: roi, social media, strategy, twitter
I like Brad Ward’s (bluefuego.com) take on Twitter and other social media — it’s not “R-O-I”, it’s “I-O-R” (Improve Our Relationships). A business (or in the case of my job, higher ed institution) can benefit greatly from improving their relationships with their customers.
If a business sees social media as purely yet another marketing channel in which to disburse their promotions and advertisements, then they’re missing the point, and people will see right through it. The most successful implementations I’ve seen were ones where the business used social media to have a CONVERSATION (2-way) with their constituencies.
Aaron, that’s a great point. Even companies like Dell who have had phenomenal success pushing promotions through Twitter have been successful because they were connecting with their customers and learning about what was important to them.
I heard someone recently say that it’s called social media for a reason. I couldn’t agree more.
[...] question. We’ve talked before about measuring your return on the time you spend on Twitter, and it’s important to make sure you’re getting value. A lot of the media attention [...]