A post by Jodi McDermott on The Metrics Insider last week got me thinking about how we might solve that pesky question keeping every marketer up at night: Should our company use Twitter as a way to forge new customer relationships and/or improve existing ones?
From out of nowhere, in no time, Twitter has become this decade’s Google. It reported six million registered users as of October. And there isn’t much limiting its upside. Whether it ends up making money like Google, however, is a hot topic of conversation.
Just as hot is the discussion of whether a marketer should jump into the Twitter pool. (People seem to have a lot of time to twitter about Twitter.) McDermott’s post was a comprehensive set of suggestions for evaluating a company’s involvement with Twitter.
While most pundits seem focused on the Twitter “buzz” about your company that you can monitor and jump in when needed (or not, such as with the recent Motrin-gate), I was intrigued by McDermott’s discussion of the opportunity to look at your own site stats. In essence, why not treat Twitter like another source of traffic to your site, and analyze it as such?
Same as any other source - how much, how often, length and depth of engagement, clicks-to-action (if applicable), correlation to timing of Twitter campaigns, etc. It should be pretty evident in a couple weeks whether your company should be active or passive on Twitter.
This seems so basic, but so underleveraged. Where are the case studies on Twitter-sourced traffic? We need these more than we need to know how many “followers” your brand has, how many times Zappos posted last week, what political candidate was most “Tweeted,” the percentage of negative sentiment about Wal-Mart yesterday.
Like any other source of traffic, of visitors, of potential or existing customers, until you can separate it from all the others and stand on your own two feet with your own insights and assessment, you’ll constantly be drawn toward a great sucking sound…
