Advertising on Twitter

The information “more-super“ highway

One ant is dumb, a colony of ants is smart, and unlike the Borg from Star Trek they are not commanded or directed by an “all knowing” queen, or central brain.  In fact the intelligence is created by the conglomerate of individuals working together, and sharing individual information to create the hive mind.  I have watched the social media sphere to see if this is the new level of intelligence.  When intelligent beings create a hive mind you create something hyper-awesome.  Of course to understand it you need a way to sit above all the noise and parse the data into useable information. 

Twitter is my best hope for knowing what everyone else knows in series.  With 200 million active users producing 340 million “Tweets”¹ it still has only 2.88% of the world population 6,973,738,433.  Obviously Twitter is a long way from being the hive mind of the world.  Of course if you are focusing on the United States they have a total user base of over 140 million users (active and inactive) ².  The US Twitter user base has an average age of 37.3 years old and is mostly women (60%) ³.  As business is my focus in learning this particular information.  How can I use this social hive, and its demographic to further my good/or evil business purposes?

How would I advertise using Twitter?

There are three methods to advertising on Twitter.  First promoted accounts, this would be helpful to create a large following for your company or business so that you can give them “information” about what your company is doing.  Promoted accounts puts your name at the top of the “who to follow” section and recommends people to follow you.  Keeping them engaged is then up to you.  Using the demographics within Twitter campaigns can be geo-targeted to people within a certain area.¹

The second advertising method is promoted tweets.  There are multiple options to utilize this feature.  When someone is searching Twitter your promoted tweet could be at the top of the search list.  This seems similar to Google’s approach.  You can also target specific individuals such as: your followers, people like your followers, people using a specific mobile devise platform, or geographical location.  Priced at a cost per engagement (CPE) you only pay when someone clicks, retweets or replies.¹

The third way to advertise is promoted trends.  This is a way to make the new popular trend that everyone is talking about link to your brand.  It helps you build massive brand awareness by association to the trend.  This is still in beta, and not available to all users.

How’s your advertising working?

TwitterAnalytics is available to all advertisers and allows you to check in real time the impressions, retweets, clicks and replies through the inbox dashboard.  You can check the timeline to see the history of your tweets and see the success of getting eyeballs to your ad.  Then you can create your own demographic information to see who your particular followers are and who they are following and what they are interested in, their geography, gender, and engagement.  You can find the users who are most influential in adding value to your ad campaign and target them even more specifically.¹

Advertising with Twitter gives you a very high degree of specificity when targeting your audience, there is little guesswork in knowing who specifically likes your product.  Twitter does well at targeting those who already follow you and if you can influence their network of friends to follow you also, you have succeeded.  It is now up to you to be clever enough to keep your customers/audience happy and to entice them to give you their money.

sources:

1. https://business.twitter.com/en/basics/what-is-twitter/
2. http://semiocast.com/publications/2012_07_30_Twitter_reaches_half_a_billion_accounts_140m_in_the_US
3. http://royal.pingdom.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/social-network-age-distribution-580px.jpg

Twitter Ads & Analytics

Twitter is the 9^th most popular website on the internet. And it’s only growing in popularity. Twitter users follow people, brands, and companies they like. Maybe they’re funny, maybe they’re famous, or maybe they have cool giveaways exclusive to their Twitter followers. There are countless reasons to follow someone.

Twitter Ads and promoted tweets are becoming more and more popular. And to be honest, as a regular Twitter user myself, they aren’t that annoying for being a type of advertising. Facebook is making its advertising more and more intrusive and annoying with no way of turning it off, now that’s annoying. But I’ll save that rant for another day. Here’s where you go to access Twitter Ads:

Because of the popularity of Twitter, thousands of people/companies want to promote their brand for those millions of eyes to see. The greatest thing about advertising on Twitter is how targeted you can get through segmentation. You can target users who follow a certain company, who use certain hashtags, or who have particular interests. This is great!

But how do we track these campaigns? How can we know if they’re successful? Well, Twitter has built its own analytics platform as well. With Twitter Ads becoming more and more popular, Twitter needs to prove they are bringing the right customers to the right companies.

As you can see, within its Analytics you can see your timeline activity, track followers, and analyze Promoted Tweets and Promoted Accounts activity. The Websites link is only used if you have multiple URLs. I have no experience with this so I’ll leave it alone. If anyone has experience with it, please enlighten us.

The timeline activity provides you with all mentions, follows, and unfollows numbers as well as users who have favorite, retweeted, or replied to any one of your tweets. The Promoted Tweets gives shows you tweet impressions, clicks, retweets, and replies which is all very good information to know because Twitter charges you based on these metrics. But what’s your primary KPI(s)? Well, it depends on how you want users to interact with you.

If you’re an eCommerce site looking for sales, you only want to be charged for clicks from your tweet to your website where a transaction can take place. Otherwise your ROAS is going to be quite poor. So only include a link to your site in the tweet.

If you’re looking to build your Twitter following you can promote your account. Again, you can be very specific in your audience targeting in order to reach the right people. This page reports impressions of your tweets, profile views, and follows. Essentially you’re paying to get followers here, which is sometimes worth it and sometimes probably not.

Overall, I think Twitter Analytics has come a long way. You can choose any timeframe to analyze and download it to excel to help make it more visual. My experience with Twitter Ads and Analytics has been mostly positive and I suggest it to anyone who has some extra marketing dollars to spend.

You may refer to the following link to learn more about Twitter Ads and Analytics:

Twitter Analytics

Web Analytics and Social Media

Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, Instagram, Linkedin, and Tumblr are comprise over 88% of U.S. social media market share (see graph below). Businesses and individuals alike heavily use these sites, and the more these sites are used, the more important it is to understand how to use web analytics to leverage information collection from social media usage. Both Google and Twitter provide their own analytic software, but there is a wide variety of other companies which provide similar services (some are free, others require payment).

For commercial use, Google analytics recommends measuring the impact of social media by quantifying the value of conversions and by knowing which sources referred visitors. Stephane Hamel, on his online-behavior web site, argues that social media return on investment is useless, that “social media ROI can only exist when measured and clearly correlated against clearly defined business outcomes.” In his article discussing analytics trends he writes that companies that use social media are often trying to improve soft metrics, that is, they use social media to give an unplanned boost to web traffic or to revenue. If companies truly want to measure the impact of social media they can do so with analytics, but they must do it in a thoughtful way that focuses on predetermined and well-defined metrics. “Big data,” a new buzzword has become popular as a new way for companies to increase their bottom lines. Big data is great for a business, but only when coupled with a company’s ability to analyze such data and to come to meaningful conclusions; otherwise, they only have masses of data that they are unable to draw any information from.  In September 2011, Twitter released Twitter Web Analytics  so that users could understand how much of their site is being shared across Twitter, quantify the traffic that Twitter facilitates to their site, and measure the impact of a site’s integration of the Tweet button. All of these features can help a company to move away from soft metrics and instead quantify the impact that Twitter has on their site so that they can truly calculate social media return on investment.

Another twitter analytics tool, Twtrland, can be useful for both individuals and for companies as they navigate through over 500 million registered twitter users. Twtrland allows users to search for names, locations, or tags and returns a set of twitter accounts that fit the search criteria. Once a user selects a account, Twtrland quantifies the gender, country, and type of user (casual, power user, celebrity, etc.) for all of that account’s followers. For example, followers of the NRA’s twitter account are 68% male, 95% are from the U.S., 8% are power users, 0% are celebrities; those numbers can be compared with those of Justin Bieber’s followers: 74% women, 34% from the United States, 64% power users, and 8% celebrities. The social analytics tool also displays the number of tweets per day, the retweets per 100 tweets, replies per 100 tweets, tweet content distribution (replies, links, pictures, etc.), and identifies other tags and twitter accounts that the user might be interested in. This tool is not only useful for the average  twitter user who subscribes for personal use, but could also help companies to identify target audiences, view key metrics, and track progress as they refine their social media presence.

In the end, social media analytics can be used by any type of user. Whether it’s to find new accounts to follow or to monitor the effect that a company’s social media strategy has on profits, using sites like Google Analytics, Twitter Web Analytics, and Twtrland can provide meaningful information, so long as it is implemented diligently and with the right focus and metrics.

REFERENCES

http://www.dreamgrow.com/top-10-social-networking-sites-by-market-share-of-visits-november-2012/

http://www.google.com/analytics/features/social.html

http://online-behavior.com/analytics/trends

https://dev.twitter.com/blog/introducing-twitter-web-analytics

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter

http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/16/twtrland-a-social-analytics-tool-and-simple-way-to-discover-new-people-in-the-twitterverse/

Analytics: Social Media

For years, businesses have been analyzing data to determine how best to market and sell to clients and customers. Surveys, focus groups, industry trends, etc. are all tools that they use; however, within the last few years, a new and more powerful tool has been brought to light. Social Media Analytics is the collection and analyzing of data that customers are putting out on the internet through blogs, social sites, and more. The problem comes in that many people do not realize the value to businesses and customers these tools have, as well as how to use them.

Marketing in the social media sphere is not as complicated as you might think. When deciding on a new store location, business leaders will look at demographics, where the customers are most likely to be at, and have the best access to what they want. The same goes with Social Media. Businesses need to understand what each of the platforms is best for and where you market is and isn't.  They also must understand what is being done on these platforms. It all boils down to a simple point: “social media provides a human connection that is often missing from most websites.” Social media gives a place for a community to be built, allowing customers to connect, share, and participate with others who share a common interest. The goal is to engage the customer and participate in the social dialogue.  Pushing content to customers through web links does not work. Focusing on solving customer problems is the key. (Tom Morse, SAS)

How does this relate to analytics you may ask? Analytics is the tool used to determine whether or not the social media efforts are being effective. Goals should be made as social media platforms are used. How many likes did a Facebook page or post get? How many followers were gained on twitter or how many people re-tweeted your twitter post? These are only a few examples of metrics that can be used to rate the effectiveness of a business’s social media efforts. Collecting this data and mining customer response so that analysis can be done is where the real power of analytics lies. A business can evaluate the interest in a product or get feedback for free regarding how they are doing. Monitoring social media can provide great benefits as text is analyzed to rate the positive or negative tone of feedback on a topic, or how often a product or company is referenced in comments or posts.

As with any analysis initiative, business goals must be clearly defined and translated well into how performance will be measured. Without this, the data that is collected could be completely worthless, for example: tracking the number of twitter followers and un-followers. Does this really tell you anything about how your message is being received?  There may be a little correlation until you realize that there are a number of malware bots that follow and un-follow people all the time. Are your customers even using Twitter or would Facebook be a better fit for a social connection with customers? Are your initiatives bringing more attention to your website and product or just keeping customers on the social platform? Having the ability to identify where, when and how social media effectively influences customers helps to determine the appropriate strategy to take advantage of the potential that is there. (Avinash Kaushik)

What are some best practices for analytics you've seen in developing a strategic plan for social media?