What’s My ROI On Twitter?

April 23rd, 2009

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?

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Should Everyone In the Company Blog Or Just One Person?

April 21st, 2009

We are finishing up our blog plan and one question we are struggling with is should it be a company blog where all of us blog (there are four of us, each would supply articles based on their area of expertise) or should we all set up individual accounts?
- an outsourced CFO & bookkeeping business owner

First, kudos to you for putting a plan in place before jumping in. It’s always better to begin with the end in mind (Covey) and this helps everyone know and understand, whether they are blogging or not, what direction the company is taking for one of the marketing tactics.

Second, this is actually not an easy answer. In a simple world, I would say everyone should play a part. However, I have known too many people all too well who freeze up at the mere thought of having to write a sentence, let alone an entire blog post. So here are a few things you can consider before making this decision.

1) How often do you plan to post? In your plan, did you decide how often you would post to your blog? Is it daily? If it’s daily, can just one person maintain this pace? I would determine if the schedule is possible with just one person or if it will take your entire team to contribute in order to reach your goals. You do not want to begin your blog with daily posts and then after the novelty wears off your posts do too. Remember one of the important aspects of marketing is consistency; this applies to blogs too.

2) Can everyone write? I have often said what’s painful to write is equally painful to read, whether that’s due to poor writing or a tough subject. When people don’t want to write or don’t write well, it shows. Assign a few topics and a word count cap and have your team go at it. Note how long it takes each person to submit their post and how well it may (or may not) resonate with your audience. Can you afford to have your whole team spending that amount of time on this activity? 

3) Is it important for your audience to know your team? Determine if it’s valuable for your audience to know your team and what it is they should know. Some people need to work with companies with a solid bench for helping the team, others, don’t really care so much and are OK with the front man making it happen like the Wizard of Oz. Figure out if your clients/audience values knowing you have a solid team working for them or if they really just care about you, their main point of contact.

In a very general sense, I would have your team participate, I would blog daily and I would encourage each person’s gifts to come through. This is the true essence of what makes a blog great.

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