The Twitter @ConversationAge Effect

[click on image to enlarge - total is 97,476 clicks]

Readers of this blog and many of you who follow what I share on Twitter, FriendFeed, and Facebook know that I well written and helpful content gets my attention. On this blog and my site I focus on writing it, on the other social networks I focus on sharing from the writing of others.

How much have I shared just using HootSuite just shy of 11 months? Let's call it 990 links where I used the site's shortening ow.ly. That is 4-5 links per weekday. Great brain food to get my morning started every day. Those 990 links generated 97,476 clicks. Not all links I tweet get equal attention, of course. 

Know what you measure

Right now, I measure the number of retweets (RT) pretty much manually for a couple of reasons: 1) many in my network do not use the official RT button; 2) often spaces get messed up in manual retweets; 3) many tweet and retweet using their own links for the same reason, tracking; 4) it's about reader alignment with content and not volume.

Judging from the number of people who thank me for sending traffic to their blogs, I'd say the links I tweet are aligned with the kinds of high level content I tend to share. So links are not just passed along, people are actually going to the sites and reading/commenting as appropriate.

This to me is more important than volume. It helps build community and frankly increases my credibility as a reliable source of quality material. The strategy maps to my numero uno goal.

My other goal is to understand and learn engagement and resonance with content. Both are helpful for understanding how a brand can participate and it would be neat to find out how content travels through RTs, influencers and overall sharing.

[click on image to enlarge]

Now you can dig deeper

Today HootSuite is releasing several enhancements to the tool. Their new software release will help marketing and customer support groups:

Know Customers - a-la “Social CRM” tool, the tool will track your followers, and know who they are in a Friends and Followers chart – view profile, influence and activity level at a glance, and quickly engage to build relationships

Gather Intelligence – discover what outreach tactics work best with custom URL parameters allowing deep analysis in Omniture and Google Analytics

Answer Efficiently - create an archive of stock responses and “save as drafts” to plan your work and standardize common replies for customer support

Track Success – examine click-through rates on messages, checkout time and region breakdowns, and export as CSV for custom reports or .PDF for printing

The point of an automation tool is not for it to do your work, of course. It's to make doing your work simpler, so you can attend to the things that really matter, like integrating the use of tool with your overall business strategy.

You still get to figure out who you want to reach, how you're going to listen and track, and what you will answer. Remember that it's not about more data. Often it's about what you do with the data you collect.

@ConversationAge effect

Is a fun take on the popular @ChrisBrogan effect and a reminder that you don't need to be someone else to have a successful integrated strategy. In fact, it's best when you anchor your actions in what you want to accomplish and stop chasing what others do.

You know you're spending too much time on Twitter when... and 5 things you missed while Twitter was broken drive the point home. Twitter is just a tool, what you do with it is what matters.

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What can you tweak or start that will give you a better way to align how you participate in social networks with your business strategy? Once you figure out what and why, you can dig into the how.

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Related posts:

HootSuite Intelligence on Micro Interactions

63 Twitter Tools and One Word of Advice

Twitter, Macro Insights from Micro Interactions

You're on Twitter, Now What?

© 2010 Valeria Maltoni. All rights reserved.

Comments

[Akash Sharma]

Its practical and works quite well if implemented correctly because the stats offered from the link shorting/sharing websites are getting detailed everyday, If Google analytics is for your in-house traffic, these sites are to understand the outbound traffic and things which effect it.
And yes 97,476 clicks for just 990 links is an awesome figure, that makes it almost 98 clicks per link.

[Valeria Maltoni]

And some links definitely got many more clicks than others. Plus, one things I did not add in the post, there is a Long Tail. If you look at the most clicked links, it was not all in one day, it was over time and retweets.

[Akash Sharma]

Thanks for the super prompt reply.

That is True Valeria, It does takes long time for the best of the links to become the best, The highest click getting link which I shared on twitter got about 140 and this took quite some time.
One more thing Valeria, Just a suggestion if you can assist with,which would be the best business book to get as a 2nd one, the first one I got was Purple Cow from Seth Godin.
I would appreciate any suggestions.

[David Hall]

Great information, thanks for sharing!!