Social Media Analytics – Working For You or Not?
This morning I posted Last Chance to Present at the Big Dance – ASUG Annual Conference and it being Saturday, I had to run some errands so I took my iPhone with me after posting. While waiting for my appointment, I remembered reading I’m Obsessed With New Twitter iOS Analytics Feature – Business Insider
What is this? If you use the Twitter app on the iPhone you have the option to “View Analytics” on your tweet. I did that this morning:
I only see it on the iPhone, not the iPad and not Twitter on the web.
After clicking it, I see the following:
Not knowing what “impressions” meant, I searched and found this explanation from TweetReach:
“When we say “impression”, we mean that a tweet has been delivered to the Twitter stream of a particular account. Not everyone who receives a tweet will read it, so you should consider this a measure of potential impressions. … Use these metrics to get a sense of the size of your potential audience, and use engagement metrics like retweets, clicks and replies to gain a more complete understanding of your impact.“
To me it’s even lower to see that only 3.8% clicked to expand the tweet. That is low.
I searched for the number of engagements and this site and it says it is the number of replies, retweets, and mentions. But that can’t be right, as I didn’t have that many replies/tweets/mentions when I clicked on the link.
After my appointments were over, almost 2 hours later, I clicked on the same “View Analytics” link again:
The numbers are up in terms of impressions and engagement but still a low percentage of those who expanded the tweet.
Scrolling further down:
After less than 2 hours, I only obtained 5 link clicks on Twitter. That is very low in my opinion.
So since this is volunteer work (for ASUG), I am wondering what the best way is to promote content at little or no cost, attendance at events (like webcasts)? In the past, I’ve seen direct e-mail campaigns increase engagement, registration and attendance but the downside is there are complaints about e-mail volumes. Right now ASUG only sends weekly webcast listings for Volunteer-sponsored webcasts.
What do you think?
Thanks, Tammy.
This one might not be representative enough...as your loyal followers like myself had benefitted more from the earlier links, aka "submit early and often".
Have a great one,
peter
Long time ago I used bitly to measure link clicks and found that clicks from Twitter were negligable. the best result were from posts at LinkedIn.
Fot twitter my rule of thumb is:
IMpressions = Followers / 15
Engagements = Impressions / 15 (if you are famous, otherwise divide it by 40)
So, you really need roughly one million followers to make noticeable impact...
My previous post was written from a phone keyboard, so it was too painful to type more 🙂 Based on the twitter discussion including Gregory Misiorek and Vijay Vijayasankar let me add a few more words of explanation.
Cheers.
Btw, what ver of Twitter app do you have? Polish AppStore still has 6.18.3 with no analytics feature included yet 🙁
I am on ios 8 (not 8.1, not enough space) for the iPhone using the Twitter native app
Twitter Analytics are indeed available with the web client, not just the iOS app.
As for driving more engagement with your tweets, the same things probably hold true as with any other kind of advertising: pictures/media grab attention. Not something I've really mastered, but there are ways to include "summary cards" with your tweets that can include a snippet of a target website, or better yet a photo or graphic, which is much more attention-grabbing than just a bit of necessarily very short text.
The hashtags look ok. You might hunt around for different ASUG- and SAP-related hashtags and see which ones get the most use, then see if those are appropriate for your message. Maybe #ASUG instead of #ASUG2015? or #SAPPHIRE by itself, or even just #SAP?
(I'm trying not to have those be SCN hashtags in this message... think I got it ok, though)
Also, check time of day for your tweets. Since you're targeting American timezones, obviously you want to find the time of day in America when tweets obtain the most engagement. There are some blogs out there about studies done for best times of day for tweets, facebook posts, LinkedIn posts, blog posts, etc. 7:40am on a Saturday may not be when most "business"-oriented tweeps are active. I would venture that likely the best times for folks using Twitter in your target audience are likely to be weekdays, though time of day could be anyone's guess.
Also, a single solitary tweet may not be seen by people with busy feeds. Although you definitely don't want to spam your followers, you probably need to send the tweet five or six times throughout the day, or on different days at different times of day. You can use TweetDeck, HootSuite, or Buffer to schedule batches of posts for that purpose, so you can set them all up in advance. Make each one a little different, or with a slightly different angle to the message, so they don't look spammy to anyone looking directly at your profile, and are more engaging to followers who pay attention to you.
Finally, Witaly may be right. Twitter can be a valuable social marketing tool, but for this kind of 'business'-oriented use, LinkedIn may be a better platform. But, sending LinkedIn posts and tweets is free, so do both! And a Facebook page update if there's an ASUG page on FB (I assume there is).
Matt - thank you. That's a blog in itself. I think I will take another look during business hours. Unfortunately I really can't develop/post blogs during business hours (I have a job) so maybe I post it off-hours but tweet/promote during business hours?
Peter makes a good point too about tweets about the same topic
That might work. I can't really even tweet during business hours, unless I use my phone, which is definitely less easy. So, that's where loading up the tweets (and blog posts, for that matter) for scheduled posting at a later time comes in handy. I think SCN lets you do that. The native Twitter interface doesn't, but I believe Tweetdeck (now owned by Twitter) does, and the third-party tools Hootsuite and Buffer definitely do.