As many people use Twitter for business purposes, it’s important to be able to assess whether the time and effort you spend using Twitter is justified from a business perspective.
Unless you achieve a certain level of measurable success using Twitter, you may find it more effective to leverage your time more efficiently elsewhere.
So how do you know if your Twitter efforts are paying off?
First, you need to work out what you want to achieve using Twitter. Build a community resource? Drive traffic to your site? Network with people in your industry? Once you know what you want to achieve, set yourself related goals and use these tools to monitor your progress.
Here are a few different methods you can use to assess the effectiveness of your time spent using Twitter;
1) Number Of Followers
In the early days of Twitter, it was automatically assumed that the number of followers you could attract was the most accurate measure of your popularity and level of Twitter success.
However, it has rapidly become obvious that this measure is nothing more than a minor factor regarding the effectiveness of your use of Twitter.
10,000 followers isn’t necessarily better than 1,000 followers, especially if the smaller group is a closely integrated community with common interests.
However, a larger community of followers gives you more scope to build relationships with a select group of people with whom you have most in common. It also provides the potential for your messages to reach a larger audience.
2) Traffic
If you want to drive traffic to a certain site or a specific page within a site, there are various methods that you can use to measure your progress.
First, check the log files or analytics data for your site. Second, use a link shortener with tracking stats such as Cligs to post links within your tweets. And finally, use Backtweets to check the number of links on Twitter that point to the page that you want to promote. Just visit Backtweets, enter the address of your website and it will display all the links that point to your site on Twitter.
If you find that lots of links to your site appear on Twitter, but few people click through to your site, it indicates that the wording of your tweets could be improved to attract more attention and encourage people to click through.
Alternatively, if the number of people who visit your site is high in relation to the number of links on the Twitter network, it shows that your tweets are attracting plenty of attention. So you need to focus on getting more people to retweet your information in order to increase the number of links that appear on the Twitter network.
The best way to achieve this is to increase the quality of content that you link to, so that it inspires people to share it with their own Twitter followers.
3) Favorites
One of the most underused aspects of Twitter is the function that allows users to build a list of favorite messages. As these lists are accessible to the public, they can be used to assess the impact of your tweets within your Twitter community.
The number of people who mark your tweets as one of their favorites can be used as a measure of how much attention people pay to your messages, and more importantly, whether people value the information that you provide.
To check how often other people store your tweets as favorites, just visit Favotter and enter your Twitter username. The results will show which of your tweets have been made favorites and how often.
If you monitor these results, it’s a good way to assess the type of information that it appreciated by your community and provide them with more of the same.
4) Retweets
Retweets are the quickest way to expose your Twitter messages to the widest audience possible. The best way to check the number of retweets that your messages receive is to use the Twitter search tool to search for;
@username rt
or
@username via
or
@username retweet
Just replace username with your own Twitter username.
5) People Talking About You
What is the general level of impact that you’re creating on Twitter? How often do people mention you?
Use the Twitter search engine to search for @username. This will reveal how many people have mentioned you on the network. If you want to find the people who are not talking about your directly (i.e. those who mention your name but aren’t replying to you), just search for username -@username
This will filter out the results that include the @ symbol before your username.
6) Engagement
If your main aim is to build relationships with other people in your industry, you should focus on the number of individual conversations that you hold with other individuals rather than the results of the messages that you broadcast.
In order to achieve this, it’s important to monitor the level of engagement you achieve with people you contact. How often do you initiate a public conversation with people from your community? How often do they respond? etc
Whatever you want to achieve using Twitter, the right combination of these measures will help you to monitor your progress and allow you to assess whether your time using Twitter is well spent.
Let us know using the comments below if you have any other measures that you use to assess your progress on Twitter.
