NeedaVA Expands Internationally

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. 

IOweb

Twitter Marketing Basics - Searching

Twitter’s search functionality is a great way to discover new people and content, which is imperative for startup marketing tasks. In particular, it’s an easy way to find new Twitter accounts to follow. Type a phrase or hashtag relevant to your industry into Twitter search and look at the people who come up in your results. Twitter will surface a list of people who use those words or hashtags in their bios, giving you a whole new community to get to know. Follow those people, learn about them and what they tweet about.

Try searching for your brand or company name as well, to see what kinds of tweets are posted about you. It's also a great idea to set up ongoing monitoring for key search terms like these so you can keep up with the pulse of the conversation as it occurs. You can find new hashtags to add to your tweets and Twitter chats to participate in.

Beyond the basic keyword and hashtag search, Twitter supports a variety of advanced search operators that can further refine your results to only the most relevant tweets. For one, Twitter does not require an “AND” or “+” operator to search for multiple keywords. Just type together multiple keywords into your query and Twitter will return tweets that include of those terms. For example, “social media metrics” will find any tweets that include all three of those words in any order.

However, sometimes you might want to find tweets that include one keyword or another keyword. Use the "OR" operator to separate those terms, like metrics OR analytics. You can also chain together multiple keywords to create a more complex query. The OR operator will attach to the word that immediately precedes it, very much like order of operations in algebra.

If you want to limit your results to tweets that include a link, like an article in the news or a blog post you’ve recently shared. It’s also a great way to track link shares for a Twitter contest. Use “filter:links” to search only for tweets containing links.

Twitter search works best with fairly simple queries. We recommend that you only add in a few advanced operators per query and try to limit the total number of keywords in a search query to a maximum of 5-8. Most common and proven effective queries would be Username, Date, Exclusion and Specific Phrase. And now you’re done with Step 1 of Twitter Marketing.  

Pinteresting Enough For 100 Million

Pinterest hit a milestone recently, with an official announcement that it has reached 100 million users, far exceeding the estimates of some analysts’ calculations earlier this year, such as in a report by eMarketer that calculated Pinterest would hit 47 million users in the U.S, by 2015, and 59 million U.S. users by 2019.  But as the New York Times reported, “Pinterest has faced scrutiny over whether the size of its user base and business growth can justify its huge valuation.” Over the past five years, the company has grown to a valuation of about $11 billion dollars.

According to Tribune’s report, co-founder Evan Sharp expressed to AFP that most of the users are not just visiting Pinterest once a month and “They’re actually discovering something so interesting that they’re saving it or are clicking through to the website.”

“It’s 100 million active users, more than 70 per cent of whom are actively engaged,”

This was quoted from a telephone interview they conducted. The disclosure from Pinterest is the first time since its launch in March 2010 that it has discussed the number of users. Sharp said that the majority of Pinterest users are women but noted the gender gap “is closing a little bit every month.”

However, Pinterest’s numbers are lower than Instagram, which claims some 300 million users. It is only in the past year or so that Pinterest has made moves into monetizing its growth. Slowly it has offered itself to advertisers, allowing big brands to buy promoted pins. And, while ads may seem more intrusive on Instagram, interrupting photos of fuzzy cats and weekend warrior selfies, Pinterest relies on its users to save items that they theoretically want to buy. The question, as with most tech companies, startup small businesses and even web marketing or  social media marketing companies of this age, is how they will meet their valuation. But what the numbers do suggest is that Pinterest is not going anywhere anytime soon.

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.