Measuring Twitter Engagement

How do you know if you are making an impact in your social media efforts?

Sometimes it can feel like you are just whistling in the wind. Knowing that people are listening is the encouragement you need to keep going, and knowing which of your activities produces results is the feedback you need in order to experiement and improve.

Measuring Twitter Success

Many people mistake their follower or friend count with engagement, but in fact a friend count, while a nice ego boost, is not a great metric. Each service has “activities”, and how much of this activity you initiate is a better way of working out how well you are doing at engaging your friends or audience. With Twitter it is all about tweets (Twitter messages), but the reactions in the form of clicks, replies and retweets is more important than just quantity.

Well, some celebrities have tens of thousands of Twitter followers. But if they are just broadcasting, with few conversations, then they are not necessarily engaging their audience. It could be a great “feed”, which would be evidenced by a great number of click-throughs, but without interaction there is little added benefit over RSS.

Ideally what you want is to have a good mix of conversations, in the form of messages and replies, for your links to be clicked on or produce further discussion, and for your Tweets to be re-tweeted.

Twitter Metric Monitoring

The obvious first place to look is your follower growth and retention. If your follower count is going down or standing still then you have a problem. People are voting with their feet as it were. There is a service called “Qwitter” that would tell you when people unfollow but it doesn’t seem to be working recently.

To measure your Twitter metrics beyond audience size you need to use online tools, but thankfully Twitter makes this easy via their programming API and 3rd party online services such as RetweetRank. I actually prefer to look through Twitter Search for @replies in most cases so I can read the replies rather than get a raw count, however.

Twitter Search is also valuable in seeing “mentions” – finding how often a word associated you or your organization is used, and if used in a complaint perhaps you can help the person out before the issue festers.

Counting Twitter Link Clicks

For click counting you have any number of options but my personal fave at the time of writing is http://cli.gs which despite the funny name is a very easy to use URL-shortening service with an analytical twist. Sign up and as well as shortening your URLs and saving precious characters out of the 140 you are allowed in a tweet, it will count how many times your shorter web address has been clicked. The more clicks you get, the more interesting you know your tweet was.

What’s the Point?

This is not about scoring points. The numbers are just an indication of progress, a clue to if you are making any impact. Providing the numbers improve then you know what you are doing is getting some sort of result and that you are getting better at it.

Fact is though, it is often easy to latch on to numbers as being the whole aim, rather than one dashboard for your journey toward your goal. Knowing your actual goal and how social media fits in, is the important part.

Are you wanting to increase your visibility? Sales? Donations? Business or career opportunities? Are you just hanging out? If you are using a service to merely entertain and inform yourself then all this is meaningless, but if you have a business or project reason then these metrics need to lead to those business goals, so the consequences of engagement need to be measured also.

Posted on January 29, 2009 by Chris Garrett 
Filed Under Software Tools

Comments

5 Responses to “Measuring Twitter Engagement”

  1. Gabriella on January 29th, 2009 6:31 pm

    I agree with your take on this. It has clarified a few questions I had. Being new to Twitter, I am still learning about all the great tools. Some I have chosen to use and I can honestly say they have honed my perception on how to use Twitter. Would love some feedback if you have a minute here http://tinyurl.com/ad24ep As I have mentioned being new to Twitter I have had to be “smart” about tools. But I will definitely use the ones you suggested on here. Thanks

  2. Measuring Twitter Engagement : Codswallop « on February 2nd, 2009 9:37 pm

    [...] Measuring Twitter Engagement : via Codswallop. [...]

  3. social-media.social-bookmark.me on February 16th, 2009 9:02 am

    Measuring Twitter Engagement…

    How do you know if you are making an impact in your social media efforts?

    Sometimes it can feel like you are just whistling in the wind. Knowing that people are listening is the encouragement you need to keep going, and knowing which of your activitie…

  4. Dominic Phillips on August 26th, 2010 5:00 pm

    It’s often hard to find what really engages my follower but i think this is a key in measuring your success RT’s and Mentions are vital…

  5. Mykal B Media on April 28th, 2011 3:01 am

    [...] Measuring Twitter Engagement [...]

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