Maximize Your Twitter Marketing
How can your Twitter marketing efforts pay off for your business?
Having a Twitter marketing strategy in place can do wonders for your social media marketing, but if you don’t know how to properly monitor and optimize your Twitter marketing, how can you know if you are doing it right? Below are a few pointers that can help you get the most out of your Twitter marketing by using some analysis techniques that often go overlooked.
1. Monitor Your Click-through
URL shorteners like bit.ly can be very helpful when it comes to monitoring click-through rates for a given campaign, the only problem is that studies show that people are hesitant to click through to a link when they do not know where it is going. So, the first step is to customize your bit.ly links. This is easily done, even if you do not have a professional account. For the Webmaster experts, there is a free way to customize a bit.ly link with your website. However, for those of us who are not well versed in the world DNS servers, shortened URL customization is as easy as typing in a new extension. When you save a bit.ly URL, you can edit it by simply clicking on the small pencil next to the link, and typing in your own title.
Now that we have that settled, we can employ a strategy for these links. Data in the backend of your bit.ly accounts allow you a great deal of insight into who is clicking, how often and which links are working best. Take advantage of these bits of data when it comes to evaluating your Twitter strategy, and find out where users are clicking. It is important to make sure that links are not used without a conscious decision on where they should be focusing. So if you have a link that you have designated to a Twitter campaign, keep it in Twitter so measurements are not skewed. You can also pull out the bit.ly link after it has been active for a while and add a “+” to the end of it. This will bring you to that link’s statistics page where you can evaluate how it is working. This is also great if you plan to use a link for multiple platforms, as it tells you where the clicks are coming from (i.e. Twitter, Facebook, Comments, etc.).
2. Don’t Focus on Going Viral
Hashtags might be nice to use if you are trying to join a conversation, but they are relatively useless when it comes to generating business from Twitter. Marketers love seeing a campaign’s virality on social media, but virality does not necessarily mean business generation. If you use a generic and somewhat obscure hashtag, like #blahblahblah, you might find that it picks up steam in the Twittersphere, and you might even find that your hashtag is a trending topic on Twitter. That’s great news, right? Not necessarily. Particularly if it is a generic term of phrase. Specificity trumps obscurity when it comes to trending, because you might see #blahblahblah trending, but does anyone even know that you started it? There is no point of origination that users can observe on Twitter when it comes to trending topics, so while you might have started a trend, you will eventually get lost in the noise.
Using something specific might benefit you far more, like #yourcompany. If you see that trending, then you have good reason to be on cloud nine. But you might be better off focusing your efforts on measurable actions, like the click-throughs we mentioned above, as opposed to something like hashtags.
3. Pay Attention to Your Google Analytics
Sure, click-throughs from your shortened URLs might look good. And hey, you might notice a spike in traffic on your Analytics dashboard. But how much of that traffic is converting, and what is the quality of the traffic you are driving from Twitter?
It is important to pay attention to your social signals in Google Analytics by setting up a Social Media Dashboard. It is here that you will be able to see exactly what the quality of your social traffic is, and if your efforts on social media networks like Twitter are paying off. This is especially important if you are seeing clicks but no conversion. Google Analytics gives tremendous insights into your social activity, and it will help you greatly when it comes to evaluating your Twitter programs and repositioning them to increase your returns.
What other Twitter marketing tips can you think of? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!
