So how do you measure the success of a Twitter campaign? Usually you include a link in your tweet that you hope will direct potential customers to your landing page or third party page with useful information. You may think you can just check Twitter clicks by looking at Twitter referrals on Google Analytics or your preferred Web Stats app. After all, a click on a Twitter link does include a "Referer: http://twitter.com” line in the request header.
The first problem is that not all Twitter clients are web browsers, about half are mobile apps that won’t include the referral information.
What about Twitter links that land on third party sites? You may want customers to read a review of your service on an independent site. You won’t see those clicks.
Websites often include Twitter widgets, using the Twitter RSS feed. These clicks will appear to be from the website, not Twitter.
The bottom line is that you can’t just rely on your website stats to track Twitter campaigns.
Link Shorteners
If you send links with your Tweets, you’re probably already familiar with link shorteners. They make links neatly fit into the 140-character limit in Twitter. But these services almost always offer link tracking and analytics as well, making them ideal tools for tracking Twitter campaigns. I’m including three services here that have some unique features that will help your digital marketing efforts.
Bit.ly
Until Twitter came up with their own link shortener, Bit.ly was Twitter’s default and it is still the most popular service. Once you sign up for an account, you can find out who shared your links, locations of the users who accessed that link, and total number of clicks.
Even if you don’t have an account, you can get stats of a particular link just by adding a “+” at the end of the link like this: http://bitly.com/m3FDlQ+
Unique features:
- Creates QR codes for your links
- Allows creation of custom shortened domain names. for example if your domain is newyorktimes.com, you get use “nyti.ms” instead of bit.ly as the shortened domain.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite provides a whole suite of services, one of which is domain name shortening and analytics. You can recognize the shortened links as Ow.ly or Ht.ly. This tool lets you manage multiple Twitter accounts, schedule tweets and monitor results. You can also manage Facebook and LinkedIn accounts.
Unique features
- Twitter Scheduling – Rather than sending multiple posts at once, you can schedule them throughout the day or week. This is convenient for both you and your followers.
- Auto Posting – automatically send your posts to ping.fm which can in turn post to multiple other social networks, thus keeping all your posts in sync.
Visibli
Visibli is a link shortener that also has some impressive statics information available for both Twitter and Facebook page links.
Unique features
- The Engagement Bar – This is a nice feature that helps users stay on your page after you provide an external link. You can create a small bar across the the top of the page so when you tweet an external link, your URL and RSS feed is still displayed. It’s probably best just look at an example – notice the bar at the top:
- A Study of Fan Engagement on Facebook Pages by Visibli
Summary
One the most important aspects of a marketing campaign is measuring success. These three tools can help you monitor and document the effectiveness of your social media marketing plan.
If you are familiar with these tools or would like to suggest others, please leave a comment below.