Sharing Your Success Part Three: Twitter ROI

This is the third in a series of posts exploring some of the ways you can gather data about your social media presences, make sense of it all, and report your findings. Read all three parts here; the most recent post is at the top of the page.

Measuring your Twitter presence turns out to be a little more complicated than Facebook. Instead of just one, there are several tools you can to use to get a good picture of your progress to date. Below, I list some of the tools I use (and each name is a link to that service), and summarize the service(s) they provide.

The Tools

Hootsuite: Dashboard for managing your Twitter presence. It can also be used to manage other social media tools (LinkedIn, Facebook) but I find that it is most effective for Twitter. Hootsuite includes a built-in URL shortener. Provides user stats such as language and home country. Lists your most popular tweets, and greatest advocates (users who retweet your content). Hootsuite, a previously free service, recently converted to a paid model. I find their new service and pricing menu a little overly complicated, but it still provides the useful services I’ve come to value.

Twitter Counter: Graphs the number of new followers of your Twitter account over time (see example below). Creating a graph for a time period of up to three months is free; six months or more requires you to send a tweet from your account lauding their services.

HashTweeps: Lists the number of times a particular hashtag was tweeted, the user(s) who tweeted it, and how many times that person tweeted it. Use this for measuring your institution’s hashtags.

WhoUnfollowedMe: Notifies you when users stop following you, which may help you better assess how your tweets are coming across to your followers.

Don’t forget to capture tweets that you want to highlight in your report – good conversation threads, positive feedback, etc. Copy and paste the text and the user who said it into a spreadsheet or database for future use. This is a similar tactic to the one I described in my earlier post about Facebook.

Analysis

Much of what I mentioned last week about analyzing your findings in Facebook applies to Twitter as well. Here’s what I said with a few updates for this week (changes in italics):

Take a good hard look at what the numbers and the comments are telling you. Ask questions such as:

• Which tweets were more popular? Which ones weren’t as popular? Why do you think that is?
• Which days of the week and time of day had more response than others?
• Who retweets you most frequently?
• What kinds of tweets cause people to unfollow you?

Asking good questions about what you’ve found will help you draw smart conclusions on your findings. Use those findings to set new goals. What new things will you try? What will you continue to do the same? What will you abandon entirely?

Next time, we’ll talk blogs – how many people read yours, and are they really reading it?

Note: Thanks to Andy Shaindlin of Alumni Futures for first telling me about HashTweeps.