Get your Tweeter tuned

Editor’s note: Michelle Stockman works with Little Rock-based Arkansas Capital Corp. to promote entrepreneurship development around the state. Stockman earned a bachelor’s degree from Loyola University-Chicago in communications and fine arts, and earned a master’s in entrepreneurship from Western Carolina University. Her thoughts on business success appear each week on The City Wire.

So your business has decided to jump onto the social networking bandwagon by utilizing Twitter to microblog your way to new customers. While decades of research have developed methods to track and uncover the return on investment (ROI) for traditional advertising, new methods are currently being tested for Twitter and other forms of social networking.

Recently, Jennifer Van Grove with Mashable uncovered some new ROI measurement metrics on the American Express Open Forum. Van Grove has observed a trend of tracking link sharing and searches on Twitter as two means to uncover if your Tweeting is catching on or falling flat. The steps to developing a ROI tracking plan for your social media attempts include the following:

• Define Your Goals
What is important to your company’s overall social media strategies? What are your expectations through your marketing and advertising efforts through this media? Do you want to use Twitter to increase traffic to your blog which will bring more hits to your website? Do you want to show your expertise in a particular field to draw traffic to your website or store? Do you want to convey special offerings thus attracting more retweets and amassing more followers?

• Pick Your Tools for Tracking
There are some available tools already for small businesses to use, so decide what to use based off the goals you have created. Ms. Van Grove recommends the following tools:
Trendrr:  Use Trendrr to track Twitter search results over time, as well Twitter user stats for following, followers, and updates per day. You can use their graphs to visually track change over time. The matching Twitter post report is perfect for viewing tweet count fluctuation per day for the course of a campaign.  www.trendrr.com

Bit.ly: Twitter’s most popular URL shortener gives you insight on how your shared links are performing. You’ll get click data, referrer info, location graphs, and related conversations.

Tweetmeme: If your company has a blog, you can use the Tweetmeme retweet buttons to encourage visitors to retweet your posts, and then track shares via retweets and bit.ly analytics.

Hootsuite: This is a web-based Twitter client designed specifically with the professional user in mind. The application lets you save Twitter searches and groups as columns, embed your columns elsewhere, automatically feed your blog through Twitter, schedule tweets, and view user info.

Most importantly, HootSuite comes with a stats tab to give you insight into powerful Twitter statistics. Should you integrate with their URL shortener, you can view graphs and user demographics for users that click on your shared links. Also included are charts for clicks by region, top referrers, and stats on individual tweets.

Flotzam: Use this Windows-only tool to export Twitter search results. This is especially handy if you’re conducting a Twitter campaign or giveaway using a hashtag or specific tweet criteria. You can then export the results to excel and slice and dice as you please.

Viralheat: Though this tool is designed for web-wide social media tracking, it’s also a great way to get insight into specific Twitter analytics. Use the service to create profiles with keywords, phrases, names, or expressions. You can even include standard search operators, and share data with team members by adding them to a daily email list.

• Prepare Your Reports
You have set your company goals for what your goals are for using Twitter, and you have engaged the tools to help you track whether your efforts were successful. Now take the time to put the information together to compare your goals to what really happened. Are you happy with the results or was something not quite catching on? What adjustments can be made to make your Twitter experience more successful?

Like most advertising, business development or marketing plans, evaluating the results compared to the initial expectations is a great way to see if your company is on track with its overall strategic plans. If something is off, take the time to investigate what may be wrong or what needs to be adjusted. In most cases, one or two small adjustments can have incredible outcomes.

Happy Tweeting.

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Stockman can be reached at [email protected]