Is Twitter Right for Your Business?

Twitter Questions
Photo credit: Rosaura Ochoa

Twitter has really grown up. People know what it is and millions of people are using it. We keep hearing about businesses finding great success with the medium but are you convinced? When we stop to hear the success stories, we hear a lot about the same companies over and again.

I like Twitter. I do! I do acknowledge it isn’t for everyone. B2B or any kind of marketing has new tools to use. I also see how it can be a major distraction for many of us who are busy doing hundreds of other things each day.

The number one goal in marketing is to get in front of your buyers and decision makers and prove to them that you are the right choice for them. We go where those people are. We always have. For some of us that was television, magazines, newspapers, their mailboxes, billboards, etc. Now we need to consider where they are online. They could be on Facebook, Twitter, searching for things in search engines, or watching videos on YouTube. Find out where they are and be there.

Set Business Goals, not Twitter Goals

If you are going to dedicate time and resources to Twitter, set some goals that align with your business goals. Your number of Twitter followers is not a business goal. More traffic to your site, more people signing up for your email newsletter, more people buying your products online may be better goals to keep an eye on.

Here are a 4 things you should consider measuring if you are going to participate on Twitter:

  1. Traffic Sources – An easy data point to keep an eye on is how people are getting to your website. If you have a web analytics program on your site, like Google Analytics, you can see what websites people are coming from before they go to yours. If you are participating on Twitter, make sure Twitter is one of your top traffic referrers.
  2. Create specific landing pages – Whether you promote specific content or create a page for more information for Twitter followers to view, create a unique page for them (called a landing page). Keep an eye on that specific page’s traffic and how people interact with that page.
  3. Conversions on those landing pages – Once people are on your website or a specific landing page you want to perform some type of action. That could be downloading a whitepaper, signing up for your email marketing piece, buying something from your e-commerce store, etc. Whatever you want people to do on your website, make it very clear and measure those conversions from specific traffic sources (like Twitter).
  4. Influence – Instead of just measuring how many Twitter followers you have, measure your influence. You can use a service or just keep track of things like how often you or your company are mentioned on Twitter. Also, keep an eye on Twitter lists. How many people are bookmarking your content and what are they categorizing you under?

I hope that helps give you some ideas of some relatively easy data points to keep an eye on to see how Twitter is working for your business.

We talked about measuring your Twitter efforts and a lot more at our recent Twitter For Business: Intermediate/Advanced webinar. The slides from that presentation are below.

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