You Tweet, But Do You Know How to Measure Twitter Success?

Guest Contributor Chris Brogan says:

I’ve been using Hootsuite (affiliate link) for a while now, and have really been interested in a few things more than other parts: scheduled tweets and stats. I want to talk about the latter today. (Note: I’m an affiliate for this product because I really appreciate what it does for me.)

Checking Stats

I became interested in which of my tweets with links were successful or not, so I started looking at the details of what Hootsuite provided. For the picture above at the top of the post, I was surprised that so many people clicked the link about how introverts view confidence, but also not surprised that there weren't a lot of retweets.

In another case, I tweeted a link to Coca-Cola’s wrapped up social media year:

I got over a thousand clicks of that link. And just an hour before I started writing this post, I sent this link about getting more Twitter followers:

That post is a joke post, but the text of the link is linkbait.

What I Believe

People tend to click more on things that aren’t self-promotional. For instance, I get around 300-500 clicks when I push subscriptions to my own newsletter. Thus, promoting myself via Twitter isn’t really as effective as promoting really great content.

Except that it is. Here’s the other stat to throw in.

Every time I tweet something that pops over 1000 or more clicks in a reasonably short time, I *also* get a few hundred (up to 1000 or so) new followers within a few hours. So, that means that people are retweeting it a lot, sending it out to their audiences, and overall giving me a lot more attention when I find the gold.

Are You Looking At Your Stats?

Every link shortener, even the ones built into the twitter.com client, have stats pages. You can do some analysis of your own. When you do, I think you’ll be surprised by what hits and what doesn’t.

Thoughts? Questions? Bits to share with the peanut gallery?

And if you like Hootsuite, check it out.

Chris Brogan is President of Human Business Works, a company providing business systems for small business. He consults with Fortune 100/500 companies and speaks professionally.

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