Issues with social media metrics: Twitter
I apologize in advance. This is a stream of conscious rant about various Twitter metrics and analysis that take part in social media. It is a result of seeing one too many posts about meaning from metrics that I see as meaningless. This may become a series where I explain problems with other metrics.
Ever see a social media person talk about measuring ROI on Twitter? The focus tends to be on two major metrics: Total follower count and total retweets. Whenever I see a consultant advocating the first as a meaningful metric, I want to tell the world that they should not hire that person. Brand awareness is important. That’s why companies pay for naming rights of stadiums, even if the ROI is questionable or hard to measure. Twitter just doesn’t work that way: Getting a follower does not translate into name recognition for your brand, website, interest or self. Okay, it might… but not if the goal is to get as many followers as possible. Here I am defining many as 1,000+. If everyone who follows you has 1,000+ people they follow, the chance of you getting your message across to them where they will see it are slim to none. (1) A system that encourages you to go out and seek likely follow backs generally relies on getting them from those 1,000+ follows people. It becomes a great big circle of following in order to build up followers. Big deal: You have 10,000 followers, who all have 10,000 followers who never read each other’s tweets. No brand recognition there. No personal connection. No traffic generation.
Instead of total number of followers, the metric you want to measure is the average number of followers for the people that follow you. Your ideal is a number between 50 and 250. This generally indicates that the person has a commitment to check Twitter regularly to see what people they follow are doing and have people that will check to see what they are updating. It means that if you post a tweet, chances are these people will have that Tweet visible on their timeline for at least ten minutes, up to possibly an hour. Less then 50 follows indicates a person probably isn’t checking Twitter regularly. More than 250 means much less visibility for you if they are reading their entire timeline. It also means that their is the potential that the person running the account is using a tool to manage their timeline so that they may never read you. If you want to get read on Twitter (the rational for getting more followers), you’ve got to target those who will read you to begin with.
Instead of total followers, if you’re a bricks and mortar business, you want a metric of how many of your followers live in areas where your market is. This, like the average total number of follows your followers have, is not an easy number to get. If you’re a minor league team in the United States, your market is largely going to be people who live with in an hour or two of your home grounds. If your team has a relationship with a team up or down the ladder, your market may extend to that area. Your market may also extend to where places where players from your team originate. These people are likely to purchase tickets to your game, attend games on the road, listen or watch games over streaming audio or video, or buy merchandise based on your team. Identify those locations or categories of followers and count them. Ignore those followers who don’t. Count the person who lives in your town: Do not count the fly fishing business from Canada, or the follower from Brazil who never mentions your sport and only tweets about Justin Beiber. The second two, unless you have evidence to the contrary, are not going to convert into any sort of sales or provide a relationship that can further your own goals. There is nothing wrong with having those followers (2) even if they provide you with nothing back in return. Just don’t try to get them by following large numbers of people. What’s the easiest way to count people in your market? Follow them and only them back. If you just want to follow a few people, add people in your market to a list. This makes the number really, really easy to keep track of as you just have to keep track of new followers that Twitter e-mails you about. If people didn’t make it on your list the first time, you can add them to your list or to your follows when they retweet you or @ reply you. Total people following you in your market counts 100 times more than the person not in your market who you likely won’t convert into a potential sale, job or viewer.
Why do people use total followers rather than average number of follows their followers have or the total number of potential people in their market? They generally do that because the first metric is easy to get a number for. The second and third ones are pretty hard to get at this time. Just because a metric is easy to get doesn’t mean it is the right one to use. In this case, try to spend the time to get the more meaningful number. That way you know your message is actually getting out to the people who matter.
While I’m on this topic of Twitter follower counts as a metric, here is another one to consider for a special subset of people who mention their social media prowess, with all the details about how to do that available on their website. When I say their website, I mean that thing they cross promote on Twitter and LinkedIn and on other social networks. For them, there exists a special metric: Ratio of Twitter followers to the total unique visitors Compete says that they have to their site. I chose Compete because it actually gives you a number and heavy social media users are more likely to have Compete installed on their browser. (3) Given that, the measurement for traffic to their site should actually be higher than it actually is… but I digress. Twitter followers/Website traffic. Important metric. Ideally, the number should be less than one. If it is greater than one, it says that the person running the Twitter account does not effectively promote what matters: Themselves. People don’t want to read what that person has to say in any depth. Twitter followers aren’t clicking on the person’s links. Followers aren’t sharing links to that person’s content with their own Twitter followers or Facebook friends or linking to it on their blog. If a person really matters, with a few notable exceptions (4), people will want to follow their links. The measure of 34,000 Twitter followers/6,000 monthly visitors thus is incredibly meaningful. It says that the person can get followers but they can’t convert that into traffic: People aren’t interested in more meaningful dialog with the account owner.
Moving on to that second Twitter metric that people like to talk up: ReTweets. There is nothing wrong with this number and can be useful in terms of determining how entertaining or useful people find the content you’re putting out on Twitter. (5) It is just one of those metrics that people treat as if it exists in isolation and that’s where it becomes less meaningful. First, before even beginning to look at the number, ask yourself an important question: Why do you want your content ReTweeted? If your goal is to use Twitter ReTweets to convert into sales or page views to your site, then 5,000 ReTweets which result in zero sales or zero visits means that your failure rate is 5,000. Who cares if you get 5,000 ReTweets if it doesn’t help you meet your goal? If your goal is to use ReTweets to start a conversation and no one @ replies to you or goes to your blog to have a conversation with you, then your ReTweet campaign wasn’t successful. ReTweet metrics are only useful as they pertain to helping achieve other measurable goals. A ReTweet totals metric, absent another metric, is a number about ego boosts and helping with your own self worth on Twitter.
Other metrics people like to mention for Twitter include total mentions. The more mentions you get, the more times the tag you created gets used, the better it is for your brand in gaining recognition. This is great in theory as a measurement tool. What it ignores is sentiment analysis. If you can get users to tag 50,000 of their tweets, that could be great brand recognition. At the same time, it could mean some one else highjacked your messaged for shits and giggles. (6) It could also have been highjacked by people who have complaints about your service or product. 50,000 tweets do you very little good if 45,000 are from an angry mob. If you’re doing a campaign involving ReTweets or mentioning a tag, some people can and do take that too far. Your audience of tag user may flood their Twitter feed with your message so often that they piss off people into unfollowing them. That hurts your reach. Another brand could highjack your tag to promote their related product. Sentiment and audience reaction ultimately matter more than sheer numbers. If you can count the total of positive, negative, neutral, highjacked posts using a tag, that number will be more helpful than total mentions.
The major Twitter metrics have serious flaws. They don’t tell the whole story and often provide a misleading picture. The only way for these metrics to work is for them to be broken down into smaller, more harder to measure numbers that answer how the measure helps you measure your market. And please encourage people to stop promoting ineffective measures. Just because it is an easy number to get doesn’t make it worth using: People shouldn’t be paying for that. Flawed data is flawed and the industry as a whole is hurt when we constantly allow bad practices to continue.
1. I follow 300 people. I’m in Australia. I can’t keep up with all my American friends when they are busy tweeting while I’m asleep and I don’t have nearly that many followers.
2. Why? Because everyone thinks that number matter and it doesn’t hurt to have followers who don’t do anything for you.
3. Alexa doesn’t give real traffic volume. It just gives a ranking compared to other sites. As we’re comparing Twitter followers to visitors to a site, using Alexa for comparison purposes doesn’t work.
4. Stuff My Dad Says, the BP satire updates, celebrities are all examples where this doesn’t work. Brick and mortar websites also may be an exception as you can put some content on aggragate services like Facebook and Foursquare. Bricks and mortar stores can use those discounts on those sites to measure the effectiveness of their campaign. Websites and content providers? Not so much. If you’re reading this, you’re probably not an exception.
5. In that regard, it is actually a bit more useful than total followers are. There are fewer bot/indiscriminate ReTweeters/spammers than there are bot/indiscriminate followers/spammers.
6. Yes, this does happen. And it doesn’t always include the usual suspects.