Evaluating the Effectiveness of Your Twitter
(Editors Note: This is a guest essay provided by Kyle Uhelski)
Simple Ratios To Help You Judge 140 Characters (or less)
Twitter is king
You don’t need to be a social media expert to understand the importance of Twitter. The San Francisco based micro-blogging service was launched in 2006 and now rakes in over $140 million in revenue. Twitter has now become a key part of nearly every marketing campaign and companies from Nike to Southwest Airlines have focused an exorbitant amount of time trying to hone down the use of the service in order to stake their claim of followers. But with the every company throwing their hat into the social networking ring, it has become more important than ever to quickly be able to assess your Twitter’s value. After all, how do you know the tweets you are pumping out on Twitter are reaching the right followers? Is your message resounding upon your potential clients ears, piquing their interest for your new product or service, or is it simply taking up bandwidth and echoing within the empty caverns of the Internet? This is a difficult question, one with so many variables that no one man could definitively give you an answer. I can however, show you a few simple tricks that will help you evaluate your Twitter’s current effectiveness, and allow you to track future improvements.
Judging your followers
How to judge your followers is perhaps the most difficult and direct question one could ask regarding a Twitter account, and it is quite ambiguous, so let’s try and narrow it down. An effective Twitter account—as a marketing tool—is one that reaches a large amount of candidates who wish to subscribe to your idea, product or service. Candidates whose interests and passions are quenched by what your company is able to provide are obviously the ideal candidates to listen to your tweets, follow your links, and watch the funny videos that you post. So this leads us to the first important Twitter ratio, relevant followers/total followers. You may be reading this and asking yourself, how is one able to differentiate such an arbitrary classification? This ratio of relevant followers is simply a method to estimate the types of followers your company is attracting compared to non-relevant accounts. The difficulty in sifting out relevant followers will depend on the industry your company is apart of. The best way to sift out irrelivent followers is to evaluate the accounts that your followers are following. You are also able to easily week out the linty of spam accounts that are currently floating around Twitter in order to get a better handle on how your account is doing targeting your key market. This first ratio of relevant followers/total followers is the most subjective, but is certainly a good place to start, and will help you tailor your tweets or even your own followers to ensure that your social media marketing is targeting the right group.
More followers are better, right?
You don’t have to look very hard on Twitter to find “follow back” accounts that have been created strictly to help individuals gain a large amount of followers in a small amount of time, but is the amount of followers really the bellwether for a successful Twitter? Followers certainly help, but instead of focusing on the bottom line (how many followers you have), a better metric to evaluate would be the simple ratio of followers/following. There is certainly a correlation that can be seen between the numbers of users that you follow, versus how many are following you back. Within Twitter it has become quite common to follow back users that follow you, and for good reason. This “you scratch my back, I scratch yours,” philosophy allows individuals to get connected and to help promote each other’s accounts and has helped companies create valuable networks within Twitter.
When observing the followers/following formula it is important to know what to look for. Obviously, because this is a ratio we can evaluate it as a percent. A successful Twitter account is one where you have garnished more users following you, than you have followed, a simple concept that allows you to more effectively track your account. Ideally, if you divide the number of followers that you have by the number of users you are following you will be above 100%. After doing research on 100 random companies in the Aviation industry, the average followers/following ratio was 83% meaning that most of these companies are doing well garnishing a fair amount of followers in accordance with the amount of users they themselves are following. The idea is simple, but the explanation can be convoluted, lets take a look at some other examples.
Whenever you evaluate data it is important to consider the outliers, Lady Gaga’s Twitter yielded 14,128% and Justin Bieber’s account yielded 14,735% meaning that the amount of followers they have isn’t even close to the small group of A-listers that they have chosen to follow. Obviously these percentages are unattainable for small businesses, but still help illustrate how to use this simple ratio to evaluate your Twitter’s effectiveness, get this ratio above 100% and your doing something right.
Tweet, tweet, tweet
The amount of activity on your Twitter account also has a direct correlation with the number of followers that you will have, and the reason is simple. People who send out more messages are more likely to be noticed and subsequently followed. That being said this does not mean that you can base the success of your Twitter account on the amount of “tweets” that you send alone. After all, sending out a barrage of useless tweets does not mean that you will attract more followers than someone who produces a smaller amount of thoughtful, interesting tweets. This leads me to the final ratio for evaluating the effectiveness of your Twitter account: tweets/followers. This ratio is used for one simple reason: find out the effectiveness of the messages you are sending. This can however, be one of the trickier ratios to gauge, after all what does the percentage even mean and what is the ideal percentage for an effective twitter? Contrary to the last ratio that we discussed, this ratio should be under 100%. This means that the tweets that you are putting out are working, getting the attention it deserve and effectively attracting eyes to your companies wares.
Lets take a look at the above examples of Lady Gaga and Justin Beiber, about the only similarities between these two celebrities is that they both have a 0% for this particular ratio. This is because they have millions of followers and have only sent out a relatively small amount of tweets. Get a ratio of fewer than 100% and you are doing a great job ensuring that your tweets have been quality and not simply created to fill space. As with any rule however there are caveats, and some specific types of accounts will be predisposed to getting ratios above 100%. These types of companies may be news sites, job sites, or general career networking sites, which need to pump out high volumes of information as a part of their business model. Other than these exceptions, try and lower this ratio as much as possible and you will be ensuring that none of the 140 characters you are allowed wasted.
What does it all mean?
Twitter is a difficult concept to understand, and like most marketing strategies it is very difficult to understand the correlation with something as intangible as “followers” and the actual fiscal gains your company will realize. By keeping track of these ratios in a spreadsheet however, you will more easily be able to track the usefulness of your Twitter account over time, and better understand how your social marketing team has been doing. It is also important to keep in mind that these ratios are not perfect, but it is certainly a more robust approach to collecting metrics then to simply say that, “I have more followers than I did yesterday.” Using websites such as Tweet Deck and HootSuite are also excellent programs to optimize your account by scheduling your tweets in advance. Use these programs in correlation with tracking the three ratios above, and you will be able to ensure that your company can put its best foot forward on Twitter, and possible utilize this free tool as one of your key marketing efforts.
Recap/Summary of Ratios
Relevant Followers/Total Followers
Pro: Helps you understand how effectively your Twitter account is reaching its intended audience.
Con: Sometimes it can be difficult to decipher “relevant” accounts from “irrelevant” accounts. Utilized only as an extreme estimator of effectiveness.
Followers/Following
Pro: Understanding this percentage helps you to gauge the popularity of your Twitter account relative to the amount of users that you are following.
Con: Numbers can be inflated by a large number of irrelevant followers.
Tweets/Followers
Pro: Helps to understand the effectiveness of each tweet.
Con: Companies who need to send a super-normal amount of tweets will be unable to use this ratio efficiently