How Can Your Small Business Track Twitter ROI?

July 20, 2009

Twitter has hit the mainstream, it’s official. It started 2009 with 6 million users, and has now grown to over 16 million users today.

If you’re not already using Twitter, then you should be. Check out these posts to learn why and how:

• Twitter: Small Business Success Stories – Will yours be one of them? 
• Guide to Getting Your Small Business Started on Twitter

Once you’ve created your Twitter account and you’re using it to tweet regular updates, interacting with your followers and generally being a good source of information and conversation…then what? How do you move it on from being a fun and interesting tool, to something that benefits your small business?

It’s easy - measure, measure and measure again! But what do you measure and how, I hear you ask? You need to measure the response you get to each tweet. If you are using Twitter effectively, you will be linking to interesting articles, news reports and to pages on your own website. You should be using a tool that not only shortens those URLs, but also tracks the click through rate; such as bit.ly, zi.ma or cli.gs (among many, bit.ly is SMEketing’s tool of choice). By shortening the URLs you post in your Tweets through one of these services, you can also measure the success of that tweet. These services allow you to track:

• The number of clicks
• The time/date of clicks
• Clicks split by country
• Retweets

By tracking and measuring your tweets using one of these services, you can accurately see what subjects and topics are most popular. For example, a recent SMEketing Small Business Blog post titled Five Cost Effective Marketing Strategies for Your Small Business got a huge number of clicks and retweets from Twitter. This information tells me that people are interested in learning how they can market their small business using low cost marketing techniques (which given the state the economy right now, doesn’t surprise me!). I then use this knowledge to ensure my future marketing efforts reflect this demand; I can create new blog posts on a similar thread, expand that blog post into a white paper or in-depth article, put an offer on the SMEketing Email Marketing Tool etc. There are many ways I can use this information to further enhance my own marketing activities.

You can also learn what was not popular. You may have read an interesting piece of industry news that you thought would make a good subject of a future blog post. However, if you posted a tweet linking to that peice of news and it had a very low click through rate, you might want to reconsider writing that blog post.

Many people are using Twitter and now asking – where is the business benefit? Like a lot of new social media applications, it can be difficult to determine the exact ROI. But, by using it as a marketing research tool, it can help you direct your marketing efforts into activites that are most likely to pay off, and ensure you to avoid wasting your time on things that your stakeholders are not interested in.

UPDATE 24.07.09: Twitter today released a new ebook: Twitter 101 For Business. If you are new to Twitter, or just want to learn more about its application for your small business, I would recommend reading it.

Filed under: Marketing Planning & Strategy, Social Media Marketing

Tags: Hampshire, marketing strategy, Small business, Small Business Marketing, SME, Twitter