Reading the Stats, Fine Tuning the Schedule and Content
So you’ve been at it for a week now.
Fiddling around with some cool tools, following, un-following, tweeting, interacting. And your first #FF tweet should be on its way to your followers by now as well.
Now, I’m a rigid believer in the sage advice, “do what works” – dreadfully simple but often ignored (including me). As you start digging into different categories of influencers, connecting with a variety of people, and tweeting a bunch of things, you can start to measure what’s working, and what’s not.
In my case, I found that even though some of my articles were re-tweeted, that Twitter was of more value to me when in conversational mode. I still pepper in my daily tweets, and scratch some backs via re-tweets and favorites, but my attention is tightly focused on @mentions and targeted following evenly split between small biz owners and small biz influencers.
I originally spurned the whole #FollowFriday thing – but after testing it out a few times, it resulted in real human connections for my clients. So I adopted it.
I used to just follow people back to thank them for following me … it didn’t work. Now I personalize all of the thank you’s and the engagement level has more than tripled.
There’s no need to geek out with this stuff. It’s just talking as you know. But just like in real conversation, you only continue talking about something when sure someone is listening.
Friday – Day 5
Reading the Stats – Eyeball It
There are two methods I use to measure the true effectiveness of my (and my client’s) Twitter activities. The first is to “eyeball” it – we’ve already spent a ton of time this week on the @ Connect page of your account. If it looks busy with some variety, you are on the right track.
Here’s my @ Connect > Mentions page of my Twitter account. Note all of the different flavors of interaction. Your biz goals are certainly different, so check for lopsided interaction – lots of thanks but nothing else, @mentions without personalization, etc… Click on the image below to zoom in.
From my Mentions tab I can see that I’m not getting much in the way of information from my followers and friends. The more information I have, the easier it is to help someone – the easier it is to help, the easier it is to close that deal the right way. Based on that, I’ll start adding more specificity to my conversational tweets.
Reading the Stats – Buffer Analytics
Buffer has a cool Analytics feature built-in. Not 100% accurate, but will still give you some useful data to help you optimize your efforts. Here’s a screenshot of my Buffer Analytics page that I took this morning.
When I first saw stats like 62 clicks on Thursday, I was like “hells yeah!” – but, the way Buffer’s link shortening system works, it re-uses the link for all Buffer users. If it was a link to my site, then the I be cracking a cold beer at 9am in celebration. 😉
Also note that tweets without a link cannot generate clicks … just focus on your tweets that had the goal of click / re-tweet / favorite / etc… Personally, I use the eyeball method, and check Buffer Analytics every week or so.
The Marketing Calendar
After a few weeks of this, you’ll find some good tactics that fit your organizations goals. If you don’t already have one, you should certainly create a Marketing Calendar. Your efforts on Twitter should dovetail snugly with your marketing & operations. Here’s a screenshot of one of my client’s marketing calendars. I realize we are just making conversation, however, in business you need to make sure that even light conversations are deliberately made with intention and a healthy dose of humanity.
I’ll eventually write a detailed post on marketing calendars … I suppose if I get enough requests for it via Twitter / Comments that I’ll write it sooner than later <hint, hint>.
Making Human Connections
Don’t forget the whole point of this series is to help you make human connections on Twitter. Make sure that when you uncover some good people, that you take the next step and pull the conversation onto a more personal platform.
Remember my interaction with Tommy Walker? Well, after we conversed on Twitter, I offered to help him out if he emailed me. Then we emailed back and forth a few times, I spread the word a bit about his video project on my other platforms, and now we have a Google+ Hangout (video chat) scheduled next week to talk about collaborating on a project.
And you know what? Next time I’m in Boston, I’ll definitely look him up.
Twitter Follow > Twitter Interaction > Email Interaction > Google+ Hangout > Human Connection
That’s it for now.
If you need to revisit a topic, go to one of the other posts in the series:
Light Conversation & Timing Follow-ups (Day One)
Laying the Groundwork & Your First Tweets (Day Two)
Who to Follow & How To Follow (Day Three)
Pruning Your Followers & Prepping for #FollowFriday (Day Four)
Questions? Leave them in the comment thread below, or just shoot me a call / email.
I’d like to give a GARGANTUAN shout-out to @PettyVendetta who taught me nearly everything I know about Twitter, and a special thanks to Carson for asking the question. I know, I know … a looooooong answer to a short question.
