Twitter’s corporate influence has rapidly increased in the past year.  From Fortune 500 to small start-ups, corporate Twitter accounts are filling up the Twitterverse.  While Twitter can be a useful marketing and communications tool, it can also be very time consuming.  On average, a corporate Twitter feed updated with a couple of daily tweets requires about 5-10 hours of work a week.  If you are running a targeted program (contest, promotion campaign, product launch), that number can increase dramatically. With that level of time investment, accurate measurement becomes central to any campaign.

Page One has experimented with many different tools and fancy programs to track and monitor our social media campaigns.  For Twitter, we’ve found that an old-fashioned Excel sheet is best.  No tools exist yet to help automate this process. Below, we outline the most important metrics that Page One measures across all of our clients’ corporate Twitter feeds:

1. Followers While it is interesting for companies to know how many people are “following” them, the rise of spammer accounts can make this number misleading.  This metric should be used as a benchmark to track the other metrics that really matter.
2. Number of Tweets The amount and type of content a feed produces could dramatically influence how the Twitterverse responds to the feed.
3. Retweets A measure of how many other Twitter feeds repurpose and pass on your Twitter feed’s content.  The more people that RT or pass on your content, the larger an influence your company will have in the Twitterverse.
4. Direct Messages A measure of how many people privately interact with your Twitter feed.
5. Replies A measure of how many people publically interact with your Twitter feed.  Similar to direct messages, this number represents how people are positively or negatively responding to your messages.
6. Hashtag mentions Each feed can use and promote multiple hashtags.  The amount of times these hashtags are picked up within the Twitterverse can determine if a campaign has gone viral or been successful.
7. Mentions of keywords/phrases In addition to hashtags, it may also be important to measure specific keywords or phrases in association with your Twitter feed.
8. Clicks on unique URLs Some URL shortening services record how many clicks each link receives. Measuring the number of times that people click on targeted links from Twitter to websites, blogs, videos and other content can help determine whether you’re influencing users to take specific desired actions.  We recommend bit.ly – it has some great analytical data and we’ve found it to be more reliable than other services.

These metrics are recorded weekly or daily, depending on the campaign, and are reported to the client on a weekly basis.  Tracking the raw numbers is the first step.  How you analyze, repurpose and report the numbers will provide you with the necessary insight into how your campaign is doing across time and allow you to justify the Twitter ROI.

Get an overview of Page One’s general social media metrics.