Content Trends

Content Marketing, SEO and Digital Marketing

Twitter Analytics: 3 Tools that Track and Measure Your Success

by

Every business should be tapping into Twitter’s enormous potential for increasing brand authority and gaining qualified leads, especially of people with a need for your product or service.
There are currently more than 1 million Twitter apps and using the right ones will increase your chances of success with this unique social network. There are Twitter tools that help promote your blog, other tools that manage your time on Twitter and of-course tools for measurement and metrics.You can track, monitor and measure your progress with several tools such as Twitter Counter and Twitonomy. Here are 3 of my favorite Twitter tools:

#1. Twitter Analytics

Twitter Analytics
Twitter Analytics – A look at the Followers tab in the Analytics menu

Twitter recently rolled out its native Analytics tool. It’s better than any third party twitter tool as Twitter has unlimited access to its own data. It’s also free for anyone with a Twitter account.

Here are some neat elements of Twitter Analytics:

  • You can buy ads on Twitter and analyze these ads to see what’s working. You will get a report on metrics such as impressions, engagements, follows and eCPE metric (effective cost per engagement). It also has reports on device targeting, location, interest and gender targeting.
  • The lead generation cards tab allows you to create lead generation cards. Lead generation cards automatically capture the user’s name, username, and email address and lets them send this to you with one click.
  • The Twitter followers tab has a neat graph that shows you your follower growth and even shows you the percentage of people following you for various interests such as the percentage of people following you for content marketing, SEO etc.
  • It also gives you access to some other nice metrics such as top cities of your followers and follower gender. It was interesting for me to note that 70% of my followers were male and only 30% were female!
  • The timeline activity sorts your tweets according to most popular, best tweets and good tweets. Your most popular and best tweets are judged by the amount of favorites, retweets and replies a tweet receives. This info is very useful for crafting future tweets as you know what’s working and driving engagement instantly by looking at this metric.
  • The timeline activity shows you with the help of a graph, the amount of mentions, follows and unfollows you received in the past week. If you received a lot of unfollows a certain day, for example, you can go back and examine what you did on that day.

#2. Followerwonk

Followerwonk
Followerwonk comparing the social reach of 3 twitter handles

Followerwonk comes as a free and paid solution. Fortunately, I have access to the paid version since I pay for Moz Pro and Followerwonk comes standard with Moz Pro.
Here are some of the features that are useful in Followerwonk:

Followerwonk does a deep analysis of followers and also of users you follow including:

  • Their location
  • The best hours to get them on Twitter
  • Their social authority scores. This is useful to know because you can easily know who your top influencers are.
  • Their gender
  • Their follower counts. Again this info is useful because if they regularly retweet you, you know based on their follower size how much of a reach your tweet will have.
  • Track changes in followers – how many lost or gained – I was relieved to find that out of 90 days, I gained followers for 60 days and only lost followers on 25 days. There were 10 days with no change.
  • Want to see who your top influencers are? The sort followers option allows you to sort followers according to a number of criteria such as their social authority score, number of followers, number following, number of tweets or number of days online.
  • Want to know how you stack up to competitors? The Compare Users tab allows you to compare 3 twitter handles. You get all kinds of stats including their social authority, number of followers, number of tweets and number of people that they follow together.

    #3. Commun.it

    Commun.it
    A look at Commun.it’s dashboard

    Comun.it calls itself a community management tool for twitter. I love this Twitter tool and would strongly recommend it to anyone looking to increase their engagement on Twitter.
    Commun.it has a paid version as well which I haven’t tried but I’m happy with all the insights I get with the free version.

    • I look at the Relationships tab to tell me who are my high value members based on criteria such as:
      • my influencers
      • my most engaged members
      • my supporters
    • The Followers tab gives you a list of people to engage with, consider to follow or unfollow. It also gives you a list of new followers and unfollowers.
    • The Monitor engagement tab allows you to monitor mentions and tweets around specific search terms.
    • The Leads tab finds you new leads to follow based on their keywords and search terms.

    These are my favorite Twitter tools to monitor engagement and help me increase my reach on Twitter. What are some of yours? Please share with me in the comments below. Thanks. Also, my twitter handle is @Gazalla

    • 3 Questions to Ask Before Building Your Social Media Strategy

    by

    #1. Where does social media fit into your corporate structure?
    Depending on who you talk to, or which publication you read, the answer will vary. Some folks believe that social media belongs under Marketing, others say it is purely a PR function, while some advocate it’s an extension of customer service or that it can do wonders for recruitment, thus making it an HR tool. Truth is, it’s usually all of the above depending on your reality and the resources in place. The real answer is usually not straight forward, and asking yourself that question can lead to unexpected answers. You will most likely find that social media impacts the company at various levels, yet some departments have more involvement and thus should take a greater stake in the strategy.
    Determining where social media fits in your company also defines who ought to be accountable for it. Many hotels and airlines operate with a social media task force, in many cases made of customer service agents trained and able to address most questions and situations. It falls under Operations, or Customer Service, or even Marketing. But how can small & medium businesses (SMB) manage without dedicated resources? Here lies the biggest challenge, where it usually boils down to either finding a champion within the company or seeking help from external providers.

    #2. Does your company have a social media policy in place?
    Whether it’s the marketing folks, the lawyers, the IT guys or the PR specialists who “own” social media in your company, chances are almost everybody on your payroll is a potential brand advocate or detractor on their personal time. Of course, the line is always blurry between personal and professional, between work at home and personal time at work, specially nowadays with smartphones, laptop and being connected everywhere, all-the-time! Having said that, do you have a social media policy in place at your company? There are many varieties, but if you don’t have one I recommend you at least take a look at this social media policy tool which offers a pretty good template to start with. Or read this blog post on the matter.

    #3. Outsource or DIY?
    OK, so you know what you want to do, but you wonder who will do it? This is without a doubt the toughest question out there, that is: if we can’t do it ourselves, can we hire a freelance writer for our blog? Or perhaps ask an intern to manage our twitter account & Facebook page? Maybe the agency can look after some aspects our social media strategy implementation? Here again, there are no silver bullets and there is no one-size-fits-all answer. In most cases, outsourcing your social media execution to an intern, without proper knowledge of your brand, is a recipe for failure. But must you do it all by yourself? Not necessarily. There are pros and cons to outsourcing your social media marketing, you just need to make sure you are aware of all the options out there.
    Start by seeking, within your own company, who’s already doing social. It may be a person working front desk, or a concierge, or perhaps a waiter working in the restaurant. If they are avid tweeps or bloggers, perhaps they could contribute to the corporate blog and help humanize its content by giving the “employee’s” perspective, thus enhancing the customer experience perspective of your destination or property. These same folks can contribute likewise to other social networks, depending on your strategy and its deployment.

    Twitter and Time Management: Best Strategies and Tools

    by

    Social media pundits advise every business to promote their brand on Twitter primarily due to the sheer number and influence of it’s users.Twitter marketing although immensely powerful is also time consuming and if you are not careful, you could spend hours daily, trying to keep up with twitter conversations and power users.

    According to social media expert Shama Kabani, “Effective marketing on Twitter takes time and patience. But it also takes more than just selling or pushing your message. The key to success lies in constantly engaging and interacting with your customers.”

    So how do you effectively reach your target audience, know who is talking about your brand and know when is the best time to catch the maximum number of your followers without spending the whole day on Twitter? The secret lies in these strategies and time management tools outlined below.

    Best Strategies for Time Management

    1. Schedule a percentage of your tweets. Although, Twitter interactions and conversations are essentially what make Twitter powerful, a certain percent of your tweets such as advertising your brand and links to your blog, can be fed into tools like Hootsuite days or even weeks in advance.
    2. Follow other people’s lists. If an influential blogger in your niche has created the list, you will most certainly be able to follow all the important tweeps of your industry in one list.
    3. Create microlists so that it’s easy to follow a section or niche. For example you could make a separate list for social media marketers, bloggers, journalists and writers.
    4. Search for keywords and hashtags with Twitter search or Hootsuite. Hashtags allow you to quickly scan relevant info and tweet to your followers.

    Best Time Management Tools

    Hootsuite is an excellent time management tool. Hootsuite allows you to:

    • schedule tweets
    • keep up with multiple streams on one dashboard
    • manage multiple social profiles
    • track brand mentions
    • analyze social media traffic
    • monitor keywords and hashtags

      • Hootsuite

      The Hootsuite dashboard allows you to see a quick overview of all your twitter activity (as well as other social media activity) including your twitter stream, your interactions, brand mentions and direct messages. You can also compose and schedule your tweets days in advance.

      Expert Hootsuite users set up several searches for their keywords with effective use of hashtags to monitor relevant conversations. For example, if you are a small business consultant and you want to reach out to people who need help, you can put in a search for certain phrases such as ”need help with” “small business” or “small busiess advice.”

      #2. News Aggregators such as Summify

      Sometimes the best way to quickly glean the key points and important news is to use a news aggregator tool such as Summify. You get a periodic summary of news articles from your social networks based on relevance and importance.

      Summify helps you quickly filter through your endless twitter stream to find content that is relevant and valuable to share with your followers.

      #3. Best Time to Tweet Tool such as Tweriod

      Tweriod analyses your tweets and those of your followers to give you the best time to tweet depending upon the time when the maximum number of your followers are online. Tweriod shows you the number of followers on Twitter per hour, on weekdays and on weekends.
      Tweriod

      #4. URL shorteners such as bit.ly

      Bit.ly allows you to quickly track the metrics and reach of a tweet. It’s a major time saver as you can see several statistics at one time. In addition to seeing which post got the most link love you can also see tons of other interesting statistics which will help in your future content strategy:

      • Referring sites and clicks for your bit.ly URL
      • Referring sites and clicks for all bit.ly users that shortened the same target URL
      • Time-based runchart for clicks
      • Pie chart showing clicks by country
      • Twitter conversations with the target URL
      • A list of bit.ly users that also shortened the URL

      #5. Chat Tools such as Tweetchat

      Twitter chats are one of my favorite ways of interacting with people and keeping up with other bloggers and social media enthusiasts. The conversations usually fly by really quickly and it’s a big help to use Tweetchat. TweetChat will automatically add your chat hashtag to each of your tweets, so you don’t need to remember to do so each time. It aggregates all of the other Tweets in the chat and allows you to follow the stream as it auto updates. Tweetchat allows you to control the speed at which the tweets show up and the smart pausing feature allows you to scroll down and reply to the right person.

      Some other time savers include:

      • Tweetstats shows you your tweet cloud and your follower stats and
      • Manageflitter shows you which of your followers are inactive so that you can flush them out. It also has a number of other interesting stats such as the most talkative tweeps, followers you are not following, number of people you are following who are not following back.

      According to Wikipedia, “Twitter’s ecosystem of applications and clients crossed one million registered applications in 2011.”

      In conclusion, it is also a waste of valuable time to use too many tools and so the best strategy would also be to focus on the 2 or 3 important tools that work for you.

      What strategies and tools are you using to efficiently manage your time on Twitter? Please share your ideas in the comments below. If you like this article, please share it generously on all your social networks.

    How to Optimize Your Content for Social Media [Slideshow]

    by

    Did you know that YouTube has reached a milestone of over 4 billion global video views per day? Mind boggling statistics such as these on social media usage prompted me to create this slideshow. The first couple of slides explain why you should optimize your content for social media (for most people this part is elementary, but I’ve included it in for the fun factor and the mind boggling statistics). I’ve also included different steps that you can take so that your audience can easily share your content across their varied networks.

    I recently uploaded this slideshow on SlideShare and am pleasantly surprised at how many views it has already received. SlideShare is a social media channel that enjoys a loyal viewership base and is an extremely powerful medium. If you haven’t already, I recommend that you share your content on SlideShare to increase awareness for your brand or product.

    How to Optimize your Content for Social Media

    View more presentations from gazalla

    What are you doing to optimize your content for social media? Please share your thoughts and ideas.