How to Measure Your Results From Using Twitter

Measure Results

It is important to justify the use of Twitter by planning ahead and measuring results. One of the challenges in all of social media is to prove that it provides added value to a business. A key issue is often ROI, or return on investment.

In order to measure results, you need to develop a meaningful, measurable and specific

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objective. While an objective is often tied to sales gained over a given period of time, there are other ways to measure results in social media including influence, sentiment, share of conversation, and brand mentions.

Of course, while you can measure results it is often difficult to directly link the causes. For example, national advertising campaigns must deliver sales, but other factors will affect results such as promotions, pricing, distribution, and competitive activity. The same is true in using Twitter, especially if you add other social media sites into your marketing plan such as Facebook and Youtube.

There are a number of tools available for measuring results:

Free monitoring and measuring tools:

Measure influence: Klout, Twinfluence, Twitalyzer

Link shortening and/or tracking: Bitl.y, Budurl, Cli.gs, Hootsuite, Trackur, Trendrr, Tweetburner, Twurl.

Fee-based monitoring and measuring tools:

Cymfony, Nielsen BuzzMetrics, Omniture, Radian6, Scout Labs, Techrigy, Webtrends.

Explore the different ways you can measure your results and plan accordingly.

Twitter business tip: Make sure that no matter which ways you plan to measure your results, that you first establish a benchmark and use the same tools to be consistent.