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Twitter Marketing Basics -Metrics

There are a set of primary Twitter metrics every social media marketing specialist, more with any startup enterprise, should be tracking. Even early measurement programs can benefit from a few simple metrics, for the Twitter metrics that matter. And indeed, they are very much encouraged to be monitored.

The first, and easiest, social media metric to measure is Volume. Volume is a great initial indicator of interest. People tend to talk about things they either love or hate, but rarely talk about things they simply don’t care about, at all. While volume can seem like a simple counting metric, there’s more to it than just counting tweets and retweets. It’s important to measure the number of tweets about your brand, “Mentions” of your account and “Unique People” talking about you. Track how these numbers change over time and look for spikes outside the normal range, like if there was a cause that triggered an increase or if there are days or times when more people seem to be talking about your brand. Use this information to post more during these times to increase engagement.

Reach measures the spread of a social media conversation and can help you understand the context for your content. How far is your content disseminating? How big is the audience for your message? Reach is a measure of potential audience size, showing you how many people could have seen your tweets. The larger the reach, the more different people talked about a topic. A high reach indicates a diversity in contributors, some of them potentially influential.

A large audience is good, but reach alone does not tell you everything. Reach becomes very powerful when compared to other engagement metrics. Use reach as the denominator in your social media measurement equations. Pick important action or engagement numbers like clicks, retweets or replies and divide them by reach to calculate an engagement rate. Of the possible audience for your campaign, how many people participated? Reach helps contextualize other metrics so you can better understand impact.

Engagement is one of the most important areas to measure in social media networking, like how people are participating in the conversation about your brand, what they do to spread your content and engage with the topic. On Twitter, content can be both shared and replied to. Twitter retweets are helpful to know who spreads your content, while replies and mentions show who engages with your content, and favorite tags show who likes it.

Think carefully about your social goals and the kinds of engagement you’re interested in measuring. Measuring spread or amplification is important to know how far your message reaches beyond your direct audience. Measuring interaction helps you know which content is resonating and informs future content strategy. Find metrics that reflect what’s important to your particular needs. Measure your efforts to learn what works and what doesn't. Tweet, measure, adjust and repeat. 

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Curate Compounding Content

The compounding formula varies according to your industry and customers, but the posts do share common characteristics. While you can’t always predict which content will become compounding, there are definitely some commonalities in posts that grow in traffic over time.  How to choose a topic focus, how to title a compounding post, which types of content to include, and how to structure the post, these are all to be considered, especially for content marketing of startups or small businesses. Even in social media marketing.

Most compounding posts are tactical. They intend to help readers, typically by providing instructions. These articles fall into one of three categories, namely, broad tactical, narrow or topical. Broad tactical posts are the most likely to grow and compound.

Broad tactical posts attract ongoing attention. If you’re trying to create a compounding post, write about a broad topic and offer tactical advice with mass appeal. In other words, write for as large as possible a segment of your potential customers. Broad tactical posts include product reviews, breakdowns of processes, or instructions on how to diagnose a practical, mechanical, or health-related issue. As a compounding post generates more traffic, its search authority increases, generating more search hits and more traffic in a virtuous cycle.

Narrowly focused posts rarely grow. Posts that cover niche topics appeal only to a subset of your total audience. Because the total audience is small at the outset, narrowly focused posts generate less traffic overall. Since the number of people searching for the topic is also low month-over-month, these posts have little search authority and rarely compound. You may want some narrowly focused posts in your content mix to speak to those niche audiences, but note that they are unlikely to compound.

Topical posts create a surge, but then decay rapidly. Posts that focus on current events, a technique known as “news jacking”, would decay rapidly over time. You can expect visits for these posts to taper off as readers move to the next news event. And as in this new are wherein “content is king”, all of this is no longer to be ignored. It’s a different game now and make sure you’re content is heavily loaded when you go out on the field.