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Twitter Metrics

by David L. Smith, Tuesday, January 13, 2009, 2:30 PM

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When I first heard of Twitter, I thought about it much like many of you probably still do. It's just noise. Who needs to know when someone is having a pizza?

But I've had a few epiphanies along the way that have changed my thinking. The general background is on my professional blog with link above, so I won't repeat it here. I also posted a piece on my Fastcompany.com blog. The bottom line for me is that Twitter is a great news source, a great place for learning about social networking and a great place for tracking general noise in the blogosphere, whether it is about you, your company, your competitors or any topic of general interest. If it is worthwhile, someone will be tweeting about it. And the noise level behind something is a good indicator of general interest.

There are two major things that you can do right now via Twitter from a metrics standpoint. The first is, measure what is happening with your tweets. The second is, what is the noise about your clients?

Using Twinfluence.com, one can get the equivalent of a research run, showing reach, velocity and social capital of leading Tweeters. Barak Obama shows up with the most "reach" (followers and their connections at one degree) at over 15MM. However, he has not sent a message since the famous post-election victory declaration and now the question is whether in fact it was him or his PR machine. Blogger Jason Calacanis is #2 with over 13.5MM "reach". Due to a factor called retweeting, Twinfluence rationalizes that the followers of followers could quickly be reached through an important message being forwarded or retweeted. In fact, many of the rankings of importance of Tweeters take retweeting into account. (When they retweet you, your ranking goes up).

Some other metric companies include TweetRush, which can give you an idea about the total volume (running about 300k people per day with about 5 Tweets per person); Tweetlists, which shows the most popular "conversations"; TweetVolume, where you can find the volume of a word or brand; TwitterGrader, which measures your rank (happy to say I am in the top 5% based on reach and authority); and Twitterrank, which for some reason does not rank me as high as TwitterGrader. (By the way, my Twitter address is mediadls.)

As mentioned above, another major use of Twitter is following noise about clients and client campaigns, as well as your own company. The easiest way to follow the noise about your client is Twitter search, which is search.twitter.com. Type in your company, a client's company or a competitor and see what the chatter is. If you click on the advanced text link, you can add keywords to do with a campaign or many other factors. In fact, when the rockets started shooting from Gaza, I searched for "within 150 miles of Gaza." Very interesting to see the tweets from both Gaza and Tel Aviv on one page. This parsing of Twitter is key to the future here.

In the future, we should be able to measure the metrics of individuals on Twitter and understand how much traffic they are getting, setting up the potential of an Adwords-type situation where the writer and Twitter share in revenue. We should also be able to do the same for individual topics written about, thus facilitating keyword advertising. Technologies for both of these situations exist today; it's just a matter of Twitter deciding to open up APIs and to determine what this small company of 25 people who have achieved major influence wants to be when they grow up.

This commentary is insightful. I recommend it to others.

1 person recommends this article.

8 comments on "Twitter Metrics"

Roger Harris from Capstrat

commented on: January 14, 2009 at 7:29 AM

David,
Thanks for the useful summary.
As in any medium, metrics will be an essential component of a marketer's approach to Twitter.
That said, I am not convinced that their utility will come in establishing an "Adwords-type situation." Unlike many blogs, generating revenue is not the main reason people use Twitter. Yes, it's useful for brands and for promoting content. But people use Twitter primarily to share information, some of it admittedly "twivial"!
I think many Twitter users would be put off if they knew that users were being paid for content, for the same reason people question the authenticity of paid blog posts.
With other microblog platforms coming online (see link) it'll be so easy for Twitter management to kill the golden goose before it ever starts laying.
http://www.twitterthoughts.com/social-media-news-analyses/2009/1/7/top-10-microblogs.html
Nick Drew from Microsoft

commented on: January 14, 2009 at 4:39 AM

The content of your article is interesting enough, in a (very!!) niche way, but you don't address the basic and fundamental issue with Twitter as a medium. It is obscure - INCREDIBLY obscure - compared to other media. When a tree falls on Twitter.... nobody cares because nobody can hear it!! Unfortunately, as technophiles and people who work in technology, we're too close to remember that all the time, and because some of our circle of acquaintances use it, we forget that it doesn't scale. The vast majority of consumers do not care about Twitter - they haven't heard of it and they wouldn't be bothered if they had. For a counterpoint to this article (very tongue in cheek, though!), check out http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/01/12/dziuba_twitter_hack/
Jan Simpson from Simpson Management Group

commented on: January 13, 2009 at 7:38 PM

Nice posts - I would like add to the following to the post and comments above. Branding is important - that is what I do for a living. With that said, monitoring what people are saying is key too - not just about the brand. Their tone, conversations of customer service - etc. You miss a great deal by just searching your brand - that really isn't what branding is all about - get out of the Mee Mee Mee and mee-too attitude - and begin to look to what can I do for my customer - they are the reason you have your doors open, they are your brand - they make your brand valuable - make them valuable - and your brand points go up -
Just my humble opinion.
Jan
Jacquelyn Mogol from Federated Media Publishing, Inc.

commented on: January 13, 2009 at 4:13 PM

Hi Dave - You make a great point about utilizing the platform to monitor conversations about brands wether it be your client or competitive. There have been a few great case studies already on having it as a real-time CRM tool for brands like Virgin America, Comcast, etc..
Something you may find of interest is to start using Tweetburner to track the clicks in links you share. It's amazing to see the power of retweets & the "life" of a tweet you share. And as far as gazing your own stats, Tweetstats is fairly nifty albeit new.
And where I find this most interesting is to see where the revenue model will go & when and how content alignment will play a factor all the way down to hashtags. All the best.
Jason Damata from Fabric Media

commented on: January 13, 2009 at 2:58 PM

Good insight, Dave. Another resource, especially for marketers, brands and the like is Trendrr, which can track and dynamically graph the frequency of words and terms on Twitter. For instance, to use your example of Gaza, here is the hourly and daily frequency of those terms on twitter since fighting broke out. www.trendrr.com/tag/gaza
Martin Edic from Techrigy, Inc.

commented on: January 13, 2009 at 2:51 PM

Twitter is rapidly becoming our primary source of highly targeted leads. The ability to track keyword phrase usage within Twitter through social media monitoring gives you the ability to instantly respond to people asking about specific subjects in a public forum. So far today alone we have booked three product demos via Twitter simply by responding to conversation where people were asking about or discussing social media monitoring, our competitors and other keywords we track. Given the cost of lead generation I would gladly pay for enhanced Twitter services including the ability to Tweet 280 characters as a paid upgrade. Twitter is not mildly interesting, it is game-changing.
JP Holecka from Powershifter Media Corp.

commented on: January 13, 2009 at 2:45 PM

I have just finished writing an article on the subject of the fragmentation of the online space and how Twitter will continue the trend.
Let me know what you think.
http://powershiftermedia.com/133-will-twitter-fragment-your-marketing-efforts/
JP Holecka
William Cook from Digital Operative

commented on: January 13, 2009 at 2:42 PM

Great post Dave. It will be interesting to see how Twitter decides to monetize its efforts. We've tested out the Twitter channel with some interesting charts that display more of a trending ability also within our Smanalytics platform. It's interesting to start to measure the actual influence or ripple effect of a followers based on interactions and to see all the missed opportunities.

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DAVID L. SMITH

David L. Smith is CEO and founder of Mediasmith, an internationally recognized digital media agency with expertise in targeted media planning, execution and measurement. His Twitter address is @mediadls

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