TheWayoftheWeb

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Twittertise improves measures for corporate Twitter accounts

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Twittertise

Twittertise is billed as a method of advertising on Twitter, but personally I see it more as a tool to measure the Return on Investment for corporate Twittering – something which arguably has a lot more value than a basic advertising tool. Owner and creator Jon Steinberg got in touch via Twitter, (@jonsteinberg), but it took me a little while to get some questions to him, and I’m glad it did, because this post now coincides with a new release which answers some of the questions I had about the value of the service.

In it’s simplest terms, Twittertise is a free service which builds on Bit.ly url shortening to offer some statistics on referrals through to your website – but the latest release starts to go further than the Bit.ly tool by offering some useful graphing capabilities for overall referrals and individual messages – and graphs are always useful for corporate reporting!

Jon was kind enough to answer some questions about the thinking behind Twittertise, how brands including Comcast, Nortel and the American Cancer Society are using it, and how you could be using it for your company:

Twittertise and Whalewhisdom are both applications by Thursday LLC – can you tell us a bit more about the company, where it’s based, and how many people are behind the applications?
“Whalewisdom and Twittertise are completely separately.  I intermingled a Vimeo account by mistake.  I’m an investor in Whalewisdom.  Twittertise is wholly owned by me via Thursday LLC.  I hired a developer named Gearoid Morley in Canada to build it as a fee for service project.”

Twittertise is powered by Bit.ly – what’s the relationship between the teams behing Bit.ly and Twittertise?

“I just use the bit.ly API.  I am friends with the people behind bit.ly and it is a wonderful team and product. But I have no business relationship with them. “

Twittertise offers scheduled posting to allow Tweets to be written far in advance of being published – how do you see this being used for a medium which often leads to conversation?
“For this question, I’d point to this blog post: https://jonsteinberg.com/post/48188357/why-i-created-twittertise-i-had-twittertise. “

The website mentions Comcast as one of the major brands using Twittertise. Presumably this is in addition to human channels like @ComcastCares? Do you see brands using it for more corporate messaging etc, with human channels supplementing it?
“Yes comcastcares has used it. I envision brands using a single account that they feed with both real time tweets through the web or a client and then supplement them with Twittertise.  This will enable them to time and track important messages and notifications that require clickthrough tracking. “


Initially Twittertise combined scheduled posts (possibly based on Twitabit?), with the stats available from Bit.ly. Now the latest release has taken things beyond what was readily available with the graphing tools, have you seen a rise in sign-ups and usage?
“We never used twitabit.  The scheduling engine was completely built by Gearoid.   Today is the first big push with graphing, so I’m hoping that blogs like 140char can get out the word.  But we’ve seen pretty steady upflow throughout.  I think graphing was a necessary piece the next step in a cleaner UI.”

With the increased economic pressure to show a Return on Investment from time spent using microblogs (and on social media marketing in general), do you expect to see an increase in people using Twittertise to broadcast offers and events without investing as much time in conversation?
“The beauty is that Twitter requires a counterbalance from its corporate users.  Corporate users who simply broadcast without responding and engaging in conversation will find themselves with few followers.  The right to use Twittertise while simultaneously maintaining your followers is almost something that is earned by a corporate user.  The real time conversation tweeting by a brand is what earns it the right to track important communications where you need to show an ROI on Twittertise.”

Twittertise is free to use at present – are you aiming to monetise by developing the service and offering a subscription-type model?
“At this point, I’m honestly just trying to develop the right product for brands.  Once we do that, I think revenue will follow.”

What do you see as the next steps/developments for Twittertise
“Improve the UI and continue to try and onboard major brand users.”

Has there been any examples of a hugely successful message or use of Twittertise so far? Anything that has surprised you, or shown a particularly unusual way of utilising the service? Obviously you’ve highlighted some on the Twittertise Blog.
“I think comcastcare’s use during huricane Gustav is my favorite.  Timely messages that needed to be spaced.
https://jonsteinberg.com/post/48213746/comcastcares-using-twittertise-to-send-out-gustav
https://jonsteinberg.com/post/48214167/another-shot-of-comcastcares-using-twittertise
Nortel has also been a consistent and solid user for communicating corporate and product related information and tracking it.
https://twitter.com/nortel
On the non-profit side, I’m proud to see American Cancer Society using:
https://twitter.com/americancancer.”

Thanks to Jon for taking the time to answer a few questions, and I’m definitely planning to follow Twittertise and future releases in detail. One of the biggest problems in social media and social networking is tracking a return on the time invested, and this is one of the tools that will start to make that job easier.

It’s also interesting to note that Jon advises using Twittertise in conjunction with real human tweeting – I’m not a big fan of just plugging in an autofeed and letting it run – it could be really useful to ensure important messages don’t get forgotten or phrased badly in the rush of conversation. And it could also be useful to retweet your most important message when you’ve finished posting for the day to ensure people in different timezones might see your most important messages.

If you liked this post and want to keep up with the latest articles, news, Twitter tools and interviews, why not subscribe?

And if you missed our earlier interviews why not catch up with them now?

An interview with Blippr founders Jonathan C and Chris Heard.

An interview with Posty creator Cesare Rocchi.

Measuring marriage – and social media

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I’ve been involved in a lot of discussion about measuring social media and social networks, particularly around readership, influence, and social media and community marketing. And I quite often hear the quote that such measurement is like ‘figuring out if you have a good marriage’, which comes from Ian Schafer of Deep Focus. The Adweek article in which is appears goes on to say: “Quantitative measurements will only get you so far. “You can’t assign a number to that,” he said.”

I’m no analytics or statistics expert, but when I thought about, it occurred to me that there’s actually quite a lot of quantitative measurement of marriages that does go on. And judging whether you’re in a good marriage certainly requires benchmarking in some quantitative or qualitative way. Just the same as social media measurement can go pretty far in indicating whether your audience sees you as their one true love:

Anniversaries: Wedding anniversaries have rules (Paper for the 1st year? Gold for 50) to indicate the length of time to all interested parties – because a general trend would be that longevity equals a good marriage. By the same token, longterm, loyal, returning readers indicate you’re doing something right!

Divorce rates: By the same token, you can watch trends on divorces to see if a group is happy in marriage. And you can watch single visit users, and definitely unsubscribers and users deleting their accounts to gauge the same thing for your site. And unlike general figures for splitting up, you’re able to easily isolate individuals to explore the reasons in more detail.

Holidays and presents: Whether it’s a dowry, or the amount your partner spent on the wedding/honeymoon/Valentine’s Day/Birthday presents etc, at some point even the most romantic soul has probably looked at how much is being spent as a guide to how much their partner cares. That’s why engagement rings are supposed to cost 3 month’s wages, for example. And a key metric in the website/user relationship is definitely click-throughs and sales conversions.

Romantic dinners: One of the big tips about marriages is to make time to go out and spend quality time romancing each other. You could see that couples in a good marriage enjoy this time, chat all night, gaze longingly at each other across the table, etc. By the same token, you can monitor the bounce rate and time on site of your visitors to see if they’re visiting several pages and enjoying your company – or splitting at the earliest opportunity.

Doing the housework: Does your partner invest time and effort in doing their share around the house? Do they help to make it a home? And do your users invest time and effort in submitting User Generated Content? Do they customise their profiles? Do they comment on stories and forums?

Are they faithful?: In the modern digital world, it’s highly unlikely a visitor will use just one site in any area of interest. But rather than sulking about their polygamous ways, it’s about following them and looking at who their affair is with. Figure out what is so attractive about the other websites they visit, and look at whether you can beat it, or use it in some way. Rather than seeing them continue to stray, inject some romance by dressing up your website in the RSS feeds of the other destinations, for example.

Talking about your partner: One of the big qualitative and quantitative benchmarks is seeing how often your friends talk about their partners, and whether it’s normally in a good or bad way. That can be with friends over a coffee or a beer – or in a survey by a magazine. Whatever the source, it’s what prompts you to go home and ask why your partner doesn’t treat you as well, or tell them how badly someone else is doing. And it’s the big one for social media measurement, because it’s all about the referrals and the recommendations. Recommendations and links are the equivalent of public displays of affection.

Now, if you combine all that information about two individuals in a relationship, you start seeing that actually, there’s quite a lot of ways you could build up a reasonable idea of whether a relationship is being enjoyed by the people within it, and then be able to compare it to other marriages. It’s not 100% accurate, and maybe they’re staying together for the children, but metrics never cover ever 100%

And by the same token, there’s a huge wealth of information already available on social media marketing, especially if you’re already tracking the normal metrics via a standard analytics package.

The trick is working out what to add to what is already available (influence of prominent couples/recommendations for example), and how to bring it all together into something that is understandable. That’s the alchemy.

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