25 Twitter Hashtags Used By Digital Marketing and Analytics Community

Hashtags (keywords that follow #) are a great way to jump to topic and join the conversation on twitter. Below I have complied a list of 25 commonly used hashtags by Digital Marketing and Analytics community that you might want to track as well.

Follow me on @anilbatra

1. #measure
2. #msure
3. #bigdata
4. #analytics
5. #insights
6. #data
7. #emetrics
8. #trend
9. #reports
10. #segmentation
11. #segment
12. #seo
13. #search
14. #ppcchat
15. #cro
16. #landingpages
17. #webdesign
18. #custexp
19. #mktg
20. #marketing
21. #ecom
22. #ecommerce
23. #ecomchat
24. #ux
25. #smdata

Other tags that were provided by the readers of this blog #attribution
 
Let me know if I missed any.
Follow me on at @anilbatra

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Other Twitter Posts:

• Best Time to Tweet?
• Twitter Analytics
• 3 KPIs for Measuring Twitter Success
• All of my posts on Twitter

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Analytics Jobs

• Marketing Analyst – Mobile (Zappos.com) Henderson, NV – Zappos.com Inc. Or ITS Affiliates
• Senior Web Analyst Las Vegas, NV – Zappos.com Inc. Or ITS Affiliates

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Books that I am reading or have read recently

1. You Should Test That: Conversion Optimization for More Leads, Sales and Profit or The Art and Science of Optimized Marketing
2. Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die
3. Data Points: Visualization That Means Something

5 Tips For Great Customer Service On Twitter

Picture from CNET.com

Twitter has grown leaps and bound in last 4 years and now has over 190 Million members worldwide. Many companies have now jumped into using twitter as a means to provide customer support. Why? Well because more and more people are getting on twitter and it is way less expensive then phone support.

Recently I turned to twitter for help with one my services. There were two main reasons for me to turn to twitter 1. publicly complain about the company because I was not happy with the service and phone customer support 2. I was hoping that someone at the company will pay attention and get back to me. I achieved both. I was pleasantly surprised to find that these guys were paying attention and immediately responded.

So how was my experience? Well not much better than phone support. Though the twitter support agent tried her best but she was limited by the process and to some extent the technology. I think twitter could be a great customer support tool. However, we have a lot to learn. If companies want to use twitter as a viable customer support channel then they should be willing to pay attention to what is being talked about their customer support and brand and learn from their mistakes.

Based on my experience, I have outlined 5 tips that can help companies provide better customer support on twitter.

Five Tips for Great Customer Service on Twitter

• Knowledge - Have similar knowledge of your products and offers as your phone counterparts have. It is frustrating to hear different answers from two different channels. Not knowing who is wrong and who is right adds to the customer dissatisfaction. Whatever you say or mention on Twitter is going to be indexed by twitter, search engines and many 3rd party tools and will be there forever. So if you give wrong information via twitter it can and will be used against you. So you don’t want interns to run you Twitter customer support.
• Expectations - Answer tweets promptly or set clear expectation about when the customer can expect a reply back. Every second a customer has to wait adds to the customer’s anxiety because he/she is not sure if you got their tweet or not. With phone support you know that there is a live person at the other end. With email there is an expectation that it will take a day for someone to respond or you can send an auto response. With twitter customer expect immediate answers. Live up to those expectations or set them properly upfront else twitter customer service can backfire.
• Resolution - If you can’t resolve an issue in 5 tweets then have a customer support agent follow up by phone or offer to send a DM when the issue is resolved. You get thousands of tweets in a day and it is hard for you to respond each of those and resolve them in 140 characters. Remember not everything can be solved and should be solved via twitter. Set up a proper escalation process. At least for now, twitter cannot replace the live conversation or in person resolution experience and satisfaction for every single issue.
• Timeliness - Do not leave anything to the next day. You cannot go home without solving an open issue. Pass those issues to the next rep or hand them over to phone support. Since tweets are most likely not getting tracked in a CRM system as your phone or email support is, it is hard for you to remember the previous conversation and it is really annoying for the customer to explain everything again the next day. Ideal solution will be to track all your tweets in your CRM system. I personally had to explain my case 3 times to the same customer support agent because it was not resolved on time and each time I had to start over again.
• Information – Do not ask anything that is not required. You are dealing with 140 characters so limit the information that customer has to provide. If a customer provides you with her phone number/account number etc. you don’t need to ask her details about the products she has bought or the service she is subscribed to. All that information should already be in your CRM system. Most of the customers don’t know what products or services they have bought all they know is that something is not working when it should. Use your CRM system to find detailed information about that customer and the products/services they have.

(You can rearrange the above 5 tips to form a TIKER, Timeliness, Information, Knowledge, Expectations and Resolution, solution for Twitter Customer Support)

Remember, twitter (or any social media) is a new platform for customer support and it will take time before you can have a proper process and everything worked out. You should be prepared to take criticism and learn from the criticism because there were will be people who will write blog posts and tweet if your twitter customer support does not meet their standards.

Hope this helps. If you have a customer support story then leave it as a comment.

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Follow me on twitter @anilbatra

Facebook Page http://www.facebook.com/pages/Anil-Batra-Page/130050670343547

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Looking to fill your Web Analytics or Online Marketing position?  Post your open jobs on Web Analytics Job Board.

Current Open Positions

• Web Analytics Coordinator TIG Global Chevy Chase, Maryland
• Sr. Data Analyst at Capella University Minneapolis, Minnesota
• Marketing Manager, Digital Marketing Analytics at Magnani Caruso Dutton New York
• Digital Strategist at Magnani Caruso Dutton New York
• Sr Data Analyst at Capella University, Minneapolis
• Landing Page Optimization Analyst at Red Ventures Armed Forces - Europe

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Optizent - Convert any page into a personalized landing page for your organic search engine traffic

Understanding your Followers on Twitter

Every day I come across some scheme telling me how I can gain more twitter followers. Many so "Twitter experts" talk and write all day long about how to get more twitter followers. But how do you know if you have (or are gaining) the right kind of followers? Some of your follower constantly engage with you and you probably know who they are. But what about the rest of them? Who are they? What do they do? Are they the right audience for you? How can you create a right message to get their attention?

Understanding your Followers

One way to understand your followers is to look at their twitter bios and analyze the stuff they are tweeting about. This will help you gain understanding of their motivations. But all this is not trivial, so I started looking for a tool that will help me do this. Well, I had partial success and found a tool called TwitterSheep . TwitterSheep allows you to build a tag cloud based the bios of your followers on twitter. However it does not allow you to build a tag based on the tweets of your followers.

Still More is Required

As mentioned above this tool does not provide all the information that you need to understand your followers. Knowing what your followers tweet about; will be even more powerful than just their bios. Their tweets will tell you exactly what triggers their interest and help you in engaging with them. But TwitterSheep does not do that yet. So for now I will take whatever I can get (Hope TwitterSheep team is paying attention).

Competitive Analysis with TwitterSheep

Twittersheep is also a great addition to my competitve analysis tool. You can build a tag cloud for the follower of your competitors and see how their followers compare to yours (See below how @alaskaair follower compare to @virginamerica.).

Alaska Air twitter followers bio

 Virgin America twitter followers bio

I have not yet found any other tool that will let me build a tag cloud of what my follower are tweeting about but I will let you know if I find one. If you know of such a tool then please let me know. If you are a developer looking to build more stuff on twitter API’s then here is an idea for you, ping me and I can provide you more information.

• Best Time to Tweet?
• Twitter Analytics
• 3 KPIs for Measuring Twitter Success
• All of my posts on Twitter

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Looking to fill your Web Analytics or Online Marketing position?  Post your open jobs on Web Analytics Job Board.

Current Open Positions

• Marketing Strategy Research Analyst at Magnani Caruso Dutton New York
• Digital Strategist at Magnani Caruso Dutton New York
• Sr Data Analyst at Capella University, Minneapolis
• Landing Page Optimization Analyst at Red Ventures Armed Forces - Europe

Best Time to Tweet?

Do you know what the best time to tweet is? Recently a client asked me this question and I am sure there are a lot of you wondering the same thing. When you tweet you want to make sure it reaches a lot of people (can I say that you want to get the biggest chirp for the tweet?).

So I did some research to find out what other have to say and here is what I found

• According to Gary McCaffry, based on the traffic to his site from twitter, the best time to tweet is anywhere between 9 AM – 3 PM PST.
• Another blogger, Malcolm Coles, who surveyed 120 twitter users to find out the best time time to tweet,, says that the best time to tweet is 4:01 PM.
• Social Media Guide says that best time to tweet is 9:00 AM PST, this will allow you to hit people across the globe
• Fasctompany says that the best time to get Retweeted is 4:00 PM EST. Fast company also lists many other factors that can help in Retweets.
• According to techandlife.com, if you have a large international following then you should repeat your message, 3-4 times a day to make sure it reaches all your followers. Personally I have not followed this rule but I repeat my message at different times on different days. I guess it is time for me to do some testing.
• Guy Kawasaki says - “take your most interesting tweets (as measured by how many people retweet them, perhaps) and post them again three times, eight to twelve hours apart. “
  
• If you can identify your influencer (I will discuss those tools in another post) on twitter then you can use Tweet o’Clock to figure out when is the best time to reach your influencers.

What does this all means? When should you tweet?

Based on this information I suggest the following

1. Tweet at 9:00 AM PST (If all of your follower are in one time zone then tweet at 9:00 AM in your time zone).
2. Tweet again the same message at 1:00 PST (4:00 EST) – (you might skip this if your followers are local.
3. Tweet again the same message at 4:00 PST( If all of your follower are in one time zone then tweet at 4:00 PM in your time zone).

Analyze the data and see which tweets got the most clicks, @ or RTs. Repeat this few times and see if the pattern holds. If it does then you will know the best time to tweet. Once you figure out the best time, use that time to tweet and vary your other tweet to a different time and see which one works the best (A/B testing of Tweet time).

If tweeting at particular time is an issue then keep track of the day/time you tweet and see if there is a pattern. This experiment should help you determine the best time to tweet for you. You might also be interested in:

• Twitter Analytics
• 3 KPIs for Measuring Twitter Success
• All of my posts on Twitter

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Looking to fill your Web Analytics or Online Marketing position?  Post your open jobs on Web Analytics Job Board.

Current Open Positions

• Marketing Strategy Research Analyst at Magnani Caruso Dutton New York
• Digital Strategist at Magnani Caruso Dutton New York
• Sr Data Analyst at Capella University, Minneapolis
• Landing Page Optimization Analyst at Red Ventures Armed Forces - Europe

Measuring Success of URLs Posted on Twitter

This post is the second part of my post on “3 KPIs for Measuring Twitter”. In the first part, I wrote that one of the KPIs for measuring Twitter is the Percent Visit Rate (%VR). %VR measures what percent of your followers click on your link to visit your site.

KPI: % Visit Rate = (Visits/Followers)*100))

Measuring VR the wrong way

1. Referring Sites/Domains Report
   Late last year I did a small survey to understand how people measure the success of the links they post on Twitter. I found out that most of the people rely on “Referring Sites/Domains” report in their web analytics tool to see the traffic they get from Twitter. This seems like a great approach but there are two problems with this:
   
   
   
   
   
   1. Twitter.com is not the only way to access Twitter. A lot of people use 3rd party tools like Tweetdeck to access Twitter. A click on a link from such a tool won’t show up in the “Referring Sites/Domains” reports in the web analytics tool, it will be listed as “Direct Traffic” or “No referrer”.
   2. You can’t see the how each individual link (tweet) performed. Without this information, how do you know what works and what does not? How do you know what words trigger your followers interest?
2. Click count from URL shorteners
   Some Twitterers rely on their URL shortening service, e.g. bit.ly, clop.in, cli.gs etc. to measure the success of the links they post on Twitter. They look at the clicks they get on the links. By using the click count from URL Shortener you can overcome the two limitations that I mentioned above. However, the URL shorteners usually count clicks and not the actual visits/visitors. Which means that they, not only capture human clicks but also the clicks from spider/bots, thus inflating the actual numbers of visits/visitors. And trust me there are several bots/spiders crawling twitter feeds and links.
   Another problem with using URL shorteners reporting is that they only capture the clicks and the sources but they do not provide any post click data on the visitors. To fully understand the impact of your tweets on our site or business, only counting the clicks or visits/visitors is not enough. You have to go beyond that. You have to understand how visitors interact with your site and if they take the desired actions or not.
   

Measuring VR the right way

To get an accurate count of the visits resulting from a link posted on Twitter, use your web analytics tool campaign tracking capability. Treat every link posted on Twitter as a new campaign. Tag the links with the campaign variables so that you can track in your web analytics tool.
When you treat the links posted on Twitter as campaign, you will not only get the clicks but also the visitors/visit count as reported by your web analytics tool. % VR can then be calculated by dividing the visits by the twitter followers.
(Note: Ideally you would want to measure Visitors instead of Visits but depending on your tool and considering cookie deletion you might not get an accurate count of Visitors).

Tagging the URLs with campaign variables

Let’s say, I want to post a link to my last blog post on Twitter. Instead of simply posting a link http://webanalysis.blogspot.com/2010/02/three-kpis-for-measuring-twitter.html, I will append campaign variables so that I can track the performance in my web analytics tool.
Since I use Google Analytics on my blog, I will use Google Analytics campaign tracking. In order to track my URL as a campaign, I will add three query parameters, utm_source, utm_medium, and utm_campaign to the URL.

I usually set the utm_source to “twitter” , utm_medium to tweet and utm_campiagn to a value that represents the content of my tweet.
The final URL that I will post on twitter will be
http://webanalysis.blogspot.com/2010/02/three-kpis-for-measuring-twitter.html?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=tweet& utm_campaign=twitterkpi

Using a unique value for utm_campaign will allow me to not only know how much traffic is driven by twitter but also which tweets are driving the traffic. I can also create a custom segments in Google Analytics and analyze all my data for these segments.

The following site has 100 twitter followers so their %VR ranges from 1% - 6%. If you tie this information with the actual message in tweet, time of tweet, day of the tweet etc. you can figure out what works for the followers. By creating the segments you can slice any report in Google Analytics to see how visitors are interacting with the site.

To make it easier for you to add these variables, I have a simple Google Analytics campaign URL builderon my site that should help you to easily tag your links with the campaign variables for Google Analytics before you post them on Twitter. I might add support for other major web analytics tools in future.

Questions? Comments?

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Looking to fill your Web Analytics or Online Marketing position?
Post your open jobs on Web Analytics Job Board

Senior Manager, Business Intelligence & Web Analytics at Freshdirect (Long Island City, NY)
Internet & Intranet Systems Programmer/Analyst at American Dental Association (Chicago, IL)

Three KPIs for Measuring Twitter

How do you measure if you are being effective on Twitter or not? In my opinion it really comes down to measuring if anybody is paying attention to what you are saying or not, everything else follows. If you can measure the true impact on the bottom line then you are way ahead of a lot of people on Twitter. Congratulations to you!!! However, not everybody is yet in a position to measure at that level. This post is about metrics that you can measure on daily basis even when you don’t know the final impact on the bottom line.

Key actions as a result of your Tweets

As I said above, your success on Twitter comes down to one thing: Is Anybody paying attention to what you are saying on twitter? If people are paying attention to what you are saying then one or more of the following will immediately happen:

1. Retweets
2. @[twitter username] replies
3. Visits from the links posted in your tweets

Let’s look at each of these measures

1. Retweets
   When some Retweets your message, their followers see your message. Retweets indicates and endorsement of your message. Retweeters likes what you have to say and wants his/her followers to see that message as well. Pretty Neat!!!. There are two ways you can see the number of Retweets on Twitter:
   
   1. Under Retweet link on Twitter
   2. Searching for RT @[ twitter user name] or Retweet @[ twitter user name]in the twitter search box – Many people still use old fashioned Retweet which is to add RT or ReTweet in front of the username. (@[twitter username is also available via a link on Twitter.com, see below)
   
   Also, check out ReTweet Demystified
   
   KPI: Number of Retweets (Ideally I would like it to be % Retweet = (Retweets/Number of Followers)*100 or RPM = ReTweets Per Thousand Followers, but I have found both these numbers to be really low most of the time.)
   
   
   
   
   
2. @[twitter username] replies
   @ reply is used by the twitter users to send a reply to you. Just like a Retweet, when someone sends a message with @[username] their followers see that message (assuming their followers are paying attention). The @reply also indicates that the other person is engaging in a conversation with you.
   It is not only important to look at @[username] replies but also to look at the sentiments of those replies. Positive sentiment is mostly good and negative sentiment could be good too, it depends on how you will use that information and act on it.
   (Note: There is another version of reply called Direct Message. This message is directly to you and is not visible to others.)
   
   KPI: Number of @[twitter username] replies (Ideally it should be ARPM = At Replies per 1000 visitors or % AR but this number is low too just like ReTweets)
   
   
   
   
   
   
3. Visits from the links posted in your tweets
   Even if you are not trying to drive sales/leads from Twitter, every now and then post a link to your site in your tweets and see how many visits (or visitors) you are getting as a result of those links. Over a period of time you will know how many people are really paying attention to your tweets (or you are grabbing attention of). In my next post I will go into the details of measuring the traffic driven by twitter.
   
   KPI: % Visit Rate = (Visits/Followers)*100))
   

Additional Metrics

• Lists
  Twitter Lists are a way for Twitter users to organize people they are following into groups. Similar to users, you can also follow the lists. Getting included in a list could potentially provide you more reach.
• Number of Followers
  Number of followers is a good measure of reach. Growing number of followers indicates that your potential reach is growing. However, if all the people who follow you don’t engage in any of the activities listed above i.e. ReTweet, @ reply or click on a link then number of followers doesn’t mean much.

What about Followee to Follower Ratio?

I am not a believer in this ratio. Usually, if you are a celebrity (or at least think that you are and you think that no one else is worth following) then you will have a high followee to follower ratio. By followee to follower ratio, Guy Kawasaki won’t be considered a success on twitter because he follows more people than the number of people who follow him, giving him a ratio of less than 1 but given the amounts of Retweets he gets, he is certainly a success.

At the end your twitter success boils down to: Is anybody paying attention? Are you engaging the customers/prospects in a conversation? If people are paying attention and are engaging with your tweets then they will Retweet, reply or click on the links that you post in your tweets.

Three KPIs

1. Number of Retweets
2. Number of @[Twitter username] replies
3. % Visit Rate = (Visits/Followers)*100))

So that’s it. No Retweets, No @replies and no click on your links indicates ZERO engagement.

What do you think?

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Looking to fill your Web Analytics or Online Marketing position?
Post your open jobs on Web Analytics Job Board

Senior Manager, Business Intelligence & Web Analytics at Freshdirect (Long Island City, NY)
Internet & Intranet Systems Programmer/Analyst at American Dental Association (Chicago, IL)

Two Twitter Surveys That Need 2 Minutes Of Your Time

I am sure that you all have heard about Twitter and many of you have a Twitter account. But do you think all the twittering is worth the effort?

I have designed two Surveys to understand how people measure the success on Twitter. I will make the results available on this blog and also Tweet about it (@anilbatra)

Survey 1: The intent of this short survey is to understand if and how people track URLs they post on Twitter. http://batraonlinetwitter.questionpro.com/

Survey 2: The intent of this survey is to understand the Click-Through Rate on Twitter URLs http://www.questionpro.com/akira/TakeSurvey?id=1289844

If you can please twitter about this survey or post it on your blog that will be a great help.

Tweet This

Comments? Questions?
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Looking to fill your Web Analytics or Online Marketing position? Post your open jobs on http://www.web-analytics-jobs.com/
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Have you used Clop.in a URL shortner with real time analytics? http://clop.in/C6ZWAL

Adding Twitter Search to Google Analytics

Recently WebTrends blogged that Twitter search will now be listed in the standard search engine and keywords report in WebTrends. Omniture has also blogged about integrating Twitter search data into Site Catalyst.

As Twitter increasingly becomes a tool that people use to find information it is really critical for companies to know how people are finding their sites on Twitter. Doing so will allow them to incorporate that learning into future marketing efforts on Twitter as well as other sources (e.g. Google etc).

Since Google Analytics does not yet recognize Twitter search as a search engine like WebTrends or Ominiture does, I will show you how you can do it easily with one line of code.

However, keep in mind this solution only works when the search originates on Twitter (i.e. http://search.twitter.com). 3rd party tools like TweetDeck, those will not be captured in this solution (nor will it, I believe, be captured in WebTrends’ solution). Use this information to understand general search keywords being searched on Twitter but do not get caught up in actual number of visits that your Twitter efforts are driving.

So how do you capture searches conducted in Twitter?

GA provides a few functions to allow you to add your own search engines to the list of search engines that are already tracked by GA.

_addOrganic(newOrganicEngine, newOrganicKeyword)

You simply call this function right after var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-XXXXXX-X"); This functions to track any custom search engine.

Twitter uses "q" as the querystring that contains the keyword. So in this case our search engine is search.twitter.com and newOrganicKeyword is the value in query string q

So you code will look like

var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-XXXXXX-X");
pageTracker._addOrganic("search.twitter.com", "q")
pageTracker._trackPageview();

(Note: pageTracker._addOrganic("twitter", "q") will also work)

What will the reports look like in Google Analytics?

Note: For some reason I cannot get Twitter search to show up as Twitter in Google Analytics Search Engines report, it shows up as "search"(Maybe it’s a bug in GA? If anybody can provide pointer that will be a great help). However, for now this works fine as long as you know what "search" means in your search engine report. I am playing with filters and if I get that resolved I will post the fix or if you know the fix please email me.

Search Engines Report will show the following:



Drilling down to keywords will show the keywords on Twitter Search.



Looks like Twitter Search brings me repeat visits and more engaged traffic.

Comments? Questions?

My other posts on Twitter:

• ReTweet Demystified


• Twitter Analytics


• My Views on Twitter

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Looking to fill your Web Analytics or Online Marketing position?Post your open jobs on http://www.web-analytics-jobs.com/
Sr/Lead Analytic Warehouse/Java Engineer at Saas Company In the SF Bay Area (Emeryville, CA)
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Site: AnilBatra.com
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/anilbatra

Social Network in Action: How Twitter Helped Me

Twitter has become a tool that I have come to love. It has provided me a way to connect with people I have never met, and it has helped me find information that I might have missed otherwise. A recent experience on Twitter showed me how this tool can be used to gather customer feedback and also to collaborate with others to solve a problem.

Last week I wrote a small tool to help me create short url’s with Google Analytics Tracking embedded in them. This tool allows me to create short URLs for links that are both external (not residing on my site) as well as internal (residing on my site). The tool is open to the public so please give it and try and send me your feedback. It is nothing fancy but something that I needed for my own use. (More on this in another blog post). (Also see, Twitter Analytics and Google Analytics Twitter URL Builder)

At 11:04 p.m. on February 5th I tweeted about this tool.




Within minutes I got my first feedback in a direct message (also called “DM” in twitter language).



Yes, I had not tested the tool in other browsers and O/S but my Twitter friends came to my rescue and provided me valuable information. Several other people jumped in and provided feedback. I immediately jumped into action to fix this issue. Had it not been for Twitter I don’t think I would have been able to get such feedback so quickly.
Next I was able to isolate the issue, which was a JavaScript problem. The JavaScript I had on the page worked fine on IE but not on Firefox. Since I am rusty with my JavaScript I had 4 options

1. Search on a search engine and try to sort out all the content and find what I was looking for.


2. Call one of friends/colleagues/Freelancers who are JavaScript gurus


3. Buy a JavaScript book and try it on my own


4. Try to find if my Twitter friends (people I might not have met in person but are following me on twitter) will help again

Given that it was late, I went to bed and thought about fixing the JavaScript issue the next morning. The next morning I decided to give option number 4 a try, and posted the following message in Twitter:




I posted the message on Twitter at 7:25 a.m. and within minutes I got reply from my Twitter friends, who helped to debug or find a solution for me.



Isn’t Twitter a powerful tool for feedback and collaboration? Despite all the noise that happens on Twitter, it can be a very valuable tool, as I have found it on several occasions.

Following are my Twitter Friends, who provided me the valuable feedback, helped with the javascript issue and/or help spread the word via their ReTweets (Thank you all).

• Bryan T Robertson


• Deepak Kumar


• Stephane Hamel


• Birger Friedrichs


• Marcelo Calbucci


• David Iwanow


• Jeremy Sisson


• Krishna


• DorisEichmeier


• cbgreenwood


• moniforce


• Thomas Bosilevac


• Shannon Yelland


• Aaron Lovelace


• Neil Minetto


• Stuart Schwartz (He has helped me a lot with the JavaScript used on that tool)

Comments? Questions?

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Looking to fill your Web Analytics or Online Marketing position?

Post your open jobs on http://www.web-analytics-jobs.com/
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Site: AnilBatra.com
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/anilbatra

ReTweet Demystified

Last week I wrote a blog on Twitter Analytics. In this post I am going to talk about a ReTweet, a Twitter action and a KPI that I mentioned in my previous blog posts on Twitter.

ReTweet is when someone takes your tweet (a post on twitter) and tweets it again so that his/her followers can read it too. ReTweet is where the true power of a network like Twitter emerges.

For example if you have a network of 1000 followers then you are only reaching 1000 people. But if those 1000 (or subset of them) people take your message and ReTweet it so that it is broadcasted to their followers that’s when the message begins to extend beyond its original reach. If the message is compelling then it will be ReTweeted by your followers and their followers and their followers and it will go on.

ReTweet Best Practices

• How to ReTweet
  
  You like a tweet and decide to send it your followers. You generally do it using RT, R/T, ReTweet followed by a blank space, the symbol @ and the username of the person who tweeted it and then the tweet. Keeping up with spirit of Twitter, RT has the least amount of characters and is the best way (in my opinion) and the most common way to retweet.
  
  Example:
  
  RT @anilbatra Working on a post on ReTweeting to continue my series of #twitter posts, http://cli.gs/6tgAUT. Anything that you would like me to cover? #wa
  (I know this is more than 140 characters but that’s the not the point).
  
  Here again is the format of ReTweet RT @username [tweet]
  
  


• Proper ReTweet Attribution
  
  Since the real power of ReTweet is that it propogates the message byond direct followers so what is the right format of ReTweet when you get a message from JohnDoe that was a retweet of a message of JaneDoe? Should you ReTweet it as a message from JohnDoe or JaneDoe or both?
  
  The correct way to RT, in my opinion, is to always credit the original tweeter and if you still have room left to add more characters in your tweet then credit the person who sent you the tweet.
  
  Example:
  
  AnilBatra Tweets: Working on a post on ReTweeting to continue my series of #twitter posts, http://cli.gs/6tgAUT. Anything that you would like me to cover? #wa
  
  JohnSong takes this message and RTs: RT@anilbatra Working on a post on ReTweeting to continue my series of twitter posts, http://cli.gs/6tgAUT. Anything that you would like me to cover?
  
  Aaronlovelace gets this tweet from JohnSong, he should credit this tweet to anilbatra and if there is still space for more characters then he can RT with johnsong
  
  Aaronlovlace tweets: RT@anilbatra RT @johnsong Working on a post on ReTweeting to continue my series of twitter posts, http://cli.gs/6tgAUT. Anything that you would like me to cover?
  
  The main thing to keep in mind is to credit the original Tweeter first and then the person who passed the tweet to you.
  
  According to a tweet from @agray, you should not add the hashtag (#) again if you are not adding any new insight in the RT. (see the example above, where a hashtag was removed from both twitter and wa).
  
  

Why Should You ReTweet?

RT also help you in gaining new friends and followers.
ReTweeting helps you propagate a message to your followers that is relevant to them but might have missed since they don’t follower the original tweeter. They might rely on you as an expert in certain area and it becomes your obligation to your followers to keep them updated on the tweets in your area of expertise.
If you take someone’s message and RT then you are sending a message to that person that you are an ethical ReTweeters and genuinely following that person (and BTW: pay attention to my tweets and return the favor by ReTweeting my messages).

ReTweet as a Measure of Success

As I wrote in my previous blog post, ReTweet is one of the KPIs you should use to measure your Success on Twitter. ReTweets is a measure of how good your tweets are. If you send a message and nobody ReTweets then possibility is that the message was not compelling enough for people to ReTweet or you have followers who really are not paying attention to your tweets. As I said before the ReTweet propagates your message beyond your direct followers. This allows you to reach people who might not have otherwise followed you.

For ReTweets to work we all need to follow the ReTweeting best practices I outlined in this post.

Comments? Questions?

Other Related Sources:

• What is RT(retweeting) by Kevin Rose


• Track your Retweets with ReTweetist

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Site: AnilBatra.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/anilbatra

Twitter Analytics

There is a lot of discussion recently about how to measure authority, influence etc. on Twitter. There are a lot of tools popping up which claim to give some kind of score to help you measure you (or anyone else) against everybody else. This post is not about those tools and which ones I like (more on that later). This post is about things that we can track for sure.

There are millions of Twitter users who are tweeting every day, hoping and assuming that there tweets are being read by their followers. We can’t track all tweets and find out if they are being read but if you are one of those who post a link in your tweets then you are in luck. This post will show you how to track URLs posted in your tweets so that you can determine for sure if anybody is reading those tweets and also what kind of tweets from you are getting the most attention.

There are two types of URLs you post in Twitter

1. URL to your site
   
2. URLs to third party sites

1. URLs to you site – When you post a link to your site on twitter, you can treat it as a campaign just like a banner or search campaign. Add the campaign tracking codes compliant with your web analytics tool so that you can see the visits, page views, conversions and other web analytics data when a visitors clicks on your tweeted link and arrives on your site.
   
   Example:
   
   I use Google Analytics (GA) and you wanted to post a link to http://AnilBatra.com/, instead of just posting http://AnilBatra.com/ in my tweets, I add GA campaign parameters to the URL being posted.
   utm_campaign, utm_medium and utm_source are three query parameters that GA uses for campaign tracking.
   
   Link to Be Tweeted: http://AnilBatra.com
   
   Adding GA Parameters: http://AnilBatra.com/?utm_campaign=watweets&tum_medium=twitter&utm_source=011909tweet
   
   Now when I use WebTrends for Web Analytics then I use something like
   
   Adding WebTrends Paramater: http://AnilBatra.com/?wt.mc_id=011909tweet. Where WT.mc_id is the Webtrends campaign tracking paramter.
   You can use which ever web analytics tool you like, the key is adding the campaign tracking parameters the URL to be tweeted. It is that simple.
   



2. URLs to third party sites– Quite often tweeters post links to sites for which they don’t have access to the web analytics reports. For example, you posting a link to my blog http://webanalysis.blogspot.com/, you don’t have access to my Web Analytics Reports. As a results you have no idea how many people click though to the link that you tweeted.
   For such tracking I like a utility called CLIGS http://cli.gs (Note: I have no affiliate with this tool). This tool creates a short URL for any URL that you want to tweet. It than also provides you the clicks on that links as well as other stats such as
   
   • Geo Locations of visitors
   
   
   • Social media monitoring Cligs keeps track in real time of who tweets your link, who shares it on Friendfeed, who links to it, who blogs about it, who writes a blog comment about it, and more. Not just that, Cligs does that for the destination URL too!
     

For the sites that I have access to the web analytics data, I create a tracking url as I showed above (1) and then use CLIGS to shorten the URL (2), this provides me both CLIGS and Web Analytics data for analysis.

Apart from tracking on links the other ways to determine if your tweets are getting attention is to see the number of Retweets you get, direct messages and @replies you get. I will cover those in my future blog post.

Comments/Questions?

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Site: AnilBatra.com
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My View on Twitter

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users' updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length.

I heard about Twitter from few friends of mine who could not stop raving about it. After initial skepticism about how useful it would be, I joined the bandwagon and started twittering (Micro blogging on Twitter is called Twittering). I post about 1 tweet (post) per day on Twitter. There are some people who tweet all day long (I’m not sure if they do anything else).

From my experience so far I can tell you that it is a pretty good tool to learn things you normally would miss, things that you care about.

There are a number of people in the Web Analytics, Online Marketing and Advertising space that I follow and I’m always adding more people to follow. Following someone can provide you insight into what they are up to, what are the cool things they read or have come across, and what business challenges they are facing and trying to resolve. You can even learn how they solve these business issues.

Occasionally you will see people who tweet about their daily life. Their tweets looks like “I am sipping a cup of Starbucks mocha”, “I am walking into my apartment”, etc. But if you ignore such noise (unless you find it informative) you will find lots of useful information too.

Personally, here is how I have used Twitter so far:

1. Find new articles/blog posts : There are so many articles published every day and it is hard to keep track of everything. However, people I follow on Twitter bring that information directly to me via their tweets


2. Ideas for Blog Posts: Other people’s tweets have provided me with ideas for my own blog


3. Get Answers: I have asked questions and have gotten answers from people who follow me on twitter


4. Find new people to follow: I have found new thought leaders to follow, which in turn helps me with number 1 and 2

What does it mean to follow someone on Twitter?
Following: Following someone simply means receiving their Twitter updates.
Followers: Your followers are those who have elected to receive your tweets.

Someone mentioned awhile back about how to measure the success of your twittering. In his opinion the KPI for measuring the success of twittering is the number of followers/number of people you follow. The higher this number, the higher your success is on Twitter. What he was basically saying is that you should write great stuff so that people want to follow you but you should not follow anyone else because your KPI will drop. I don’t agree with this point of view, in my opinion, the KPIs for twittering success are :

1. The increase in number of followers


2. Number of Re-tweets/Tweet. Re-tweet is when someone takes your tweet and tweets it again so that his/her followers can read it too


3. New things you learn (hard to quantify but you know when you learn something new)

Other KPIs could be

1. Increase in your brand awareness (both personal and corporate)


2. Increase in any site side conversion (you will be driving users to your site/blogs etc.)

Who should you follow?

It really depends on your interest. I started with few people in the web analytics field and my coworkers. Now, I also look at the original tweeters of the re-teewts that come my way and if the person meets my interests, I start following them. I also follow people who are following me if they tweet about the stuff that interests me.

If at any point you don’t like what a person is tweeting about then you can just stop following them, it take one click to stop following them.

Here are some Web Analytics and Online Marketers that you might start following:

• Aaron Gray


• Alec Cochrane


• Alex Brasil


• Alex Cohen


• Adam Nenning


• Alan McGee


• Alistair Croll


• Andy Wang


• Angie Brown


• Anil Batra (me)


• Anil Umachigi


• Anjan Haalder


• Avinash Kaushik


• Bill Bruno


• Birger Friedrichs


• Bob Page


• Brad Bernstein-Reppen


• Brent Hieggelke


• Brian Au


• Brian Hawkins


• Bryan Cristina


• Bryan Eisenberg


• Chad Hollingsworth


• Chris Clapham


• Chris Grant


• Clint Ivy


• ComMetrics


• Connie Bensen


• Cortney Sellers


• Daniel Shields


• Dash Lavine


• Dave Barber



• Dean Burris


• Dennis Mortensen


• Doug Stewart


• Dustin Woodard


• Dylan Lewis


• Eric Hansen


• Eric T. Peterson


• Feroz Khan


• Fred Kuu


• Freddie Blicher


• Gahlord Dewald


• Greg Dowling


• Guliz Sicotte


• Ian Thomas


• Iya Chernyshova


• Jacques Warren


• Jason Egan


• Jason Wudip


• Jay Allen


• Jeff Jordan


• Jeff Leong


• Jennifer Day


• Jim Cain


• Jim Sterne


• Joanna Teo


• Jodi McDermott


• John Cole


• Judah Phillips


• Julie (jb) Booth


• Julien Coquet


• June Dershewitz


• Justin Metzl


• Kevin Rogers


• Kissmetrics


• Maigari Jinkiri


• Marshall Sponder


• Matthew Niederbergers


• Michael Feiner


• Michael Helbling


• Michael Summar


• Moritz Haberman


• Neil Minetto


• Nicole Rawski


• Oliver Schiffers


• Omniture


• Paul Smith


• Paul Trumble


• Paul Wille


• Peter Sanborn


• Rohan Kapoor


• Rich Page


• Ridder Manzanet
  
• Sean Carlos


• Sean Power


• Shannon Yelland


• Siegert Dierickx
  
• Stephane Hamel


• Steve Eisenberg


• Sunitha


• Terry Chadwick


• Thom Rogers


• Thomas Bosilevac


• Tim Leighton-Boyce


• Tim Wilson


• WDave Rhee


• Web Trends


• Zubin Kutar


• Zunaid Khan

I got this list from the Web Analytics Yahoo Group. Please let me know if I missed your name. If you would like your name to be added to this list then please leave your name and twitter username as a comment and I will update this list.

If you are already on Twitter I would like to hear your opinion about twitter. Do you think it has helped you personally or in business or is it a distraction?

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