It started 2009 with 6 million users, and has now grown to over 16 million users today Once you've created your Twitter account and you're using it to tweet regular updates, interacting with your followers and generally being a good source of information and conversation...
then what? How do you move it on from being a fun and interesting tool, to something that benefits your small business? It's easy - measure, measure and measure again! But what do you measure and how, I hear you ask? You need to measure the response you get to each tweet.
If you are using Twitter effectively, you will be linking to interesting articles, news reports and to pages on your own website.
You should be using a tool that not only shortens those URLs, but also tracks the click through rates.
By shortening the URLs you post in your tweets through one of these services, you can also measure the success of that tweet.
These services allow you to track:
- The number of clicks
- The time/date of clicks
- Clicks split by country
- Retweets
For example, if a recent blog post of yours got a huge number of clicks and retweets from Twitter, this information tells me that people are interested in learning more about that particular subject.
You then use this knowledge to ensure future marketing efforts reflect this demand; you can create new blog posts on a similar thread, expand that blog post into a white paper or in-depth article, etc.
There are many ways you can use this information to further enhance my own marketing activities.
You can also learn what was not popular.
You may have read an interesting piece of industry news that you thought would make a good subject of a future blog post.
However, if you posted a tweet linking to that piece of news and it had a very low click through rate, you might want to reconsider writing that blog post.
Many people are using Twitter and now asking - where is the business benefit? Like a lot of new social media applications, it can be difficult to determine the exact ROI.
But, by using it as a marketing research tool, it can help you direct your marketing efforts into activities that are most likely to pay off, and ensure you to avoid wasting your time on things that your stakeholders are not interested in.