My colleagues reminded me that I owed a follow up to my post touching on social media for investor relations. I had promised to come back with comments on Twitter measurement tools. After the long anticipated wait, the answer is that there isn’t a one-size fits all solution.
Many communications veterans want to assign big numbers around impressions, circulation, and, less so, the always dangerous ad value equivalency. These tools have been on the outs in traditional PR for some time and they should really be outlawed for social media platforms such as Twitter. Why? As PR measurement guru @kdpaine told the Top Rank online marketing blog, “Even if you have 10,000 followers on Twitter, you have no idea how many people saw your tweet because of the continuous updates and the volume of tweets. The only thing you can accurately count is what readers do as a result of seeing the information.”
In other words, how much influence do you have over your followers and what level of engagement are you able to generate? Quality over quantity. Social media is about engagement. Here are a few unofficial ways I’ve tracked and been advised in tracking engagement on Twitter.
Retweets (and replies) trump followers: I keep an eye on the growth in the number of followers – that’s a good indication of being seen. However, what’s more important to me is frequency in which you are retweeted. This shows that people are seeing what you have to say, that they found you credible and relevant, and that what you said is interesting enough for them to share it with their followers. Retweets and replies reflect engagement.
Influence of Retweet: I also keep an eye on the quality of followers. A retweet by someone that is only followed by a few people isn’t that valuable. However, a retweet by someone with hundreds or thousands of followers is something I can boast to my client about. So the retweet volume alone isn’t perfect and isn’t the end-all.
Quality of the Audience: Now, I want to know the type of audience I’m reaching. I’m in the business of healthcare and life sciences, so a retweet by @ladygaga to her 11.8M followers might be pretty cool. But a retweet by @sanjayguptaCNN to his measly 1.3 million followers would be more meaningful for targeting an audience that cares specifically about health and medicine.
So how do you measure retweets and influencers? There are some free tools out there such as Klout.com, RetweetRank.com, Twitter Counter (extra fee for retweet tracking), or tweet.grader.com as well as paid services such as Radian6. They have their strengths and weaknesses, and everyone seems to have their own favorite.
The key for me is to first establish overarching communications objectives, followed by defining a benchmark (for example, baseline retweets and influence), and then sketch out specific goals using benchmarks as a starting point. With goals and a benchmark in place at the beginning, a customizable approach to measuring how Twitter can impact reputation is just a double click away.
What tools do you use to measure the communications value of your Twitter campaign?
Jason Spark is a senior vice president at Canale Communications and can be reached at jason@canalecomm.com.
Tags: corporate communications, investor relations, life sciences, Twitter