First off, let me give credit where credit is due. I came across this information from reading one of Brian Solis’s post about “Discovering and Listening to Conversations on Twitter.” In the post, Brian refers to Jeff Nolan, who discusses Twitter analytics. Thanks to both of you!
First I’m going to briefly touch on the tools that Jeff addresses, and then show you how they work.
TweetVolume: Type in a few keywords or phrases and you will be shown a graph that compares their volume. As Jeff Nolan pointed out, this is great for monitoring a particular brand, trend, buzzword, etc.
TweetStats: This tool let’s you analyze your own twitter traffic. Also great if you work for a known brand and are twittering for your company.
TweetScan: This is really an interesting tool that let’s you see real time twitter search information. Think of it as a search engine. You type in your query and then are presented with all the Tweets that include your search.
Now let’s pick an industry and see how we can use these tools. I chose the automotive industry.
Let’s look at the twitter volume for Ford, Honda, GM, Nissan, and Toyota (note: you get a slightly different result based on capitalization, but not much)
Start off with TweetVolume. Below we can see that Ford is clearly dominating the Twitter space, Nissan has virtually no Twitter presence. We have to be careful here because terms can have multiple meanings. For example, Ford can refer to the car or to Gerald Ford. (This is where hashtags can come in, see Brian’s post for info on this).
Now let’s take a look at the actual conversations that are taking place using TweetScan. I typed in Honda as a search query and these were a few of the results that I saw. You can also get a bit more specific with your searches and type in Honda Civic, etc.
Finally, we can take a look our Twitter usage using TweetStats. Jeff Nolan was kind enough to post his stats so that is what I am including here.
Finally, you can begin to draw correlations. For example, if I am Honda and I just announced that I am giving away 100 free Hondas (via twitter, etc.) I would expect more people to talk about “Honda” (if I’m doing a good job marketing the promotion on Twitter).
Do not get too caught up with analytics and statistics. Social media marketing is not as cut and dry as web analytics is. It is not that easy to attribute revenue or traffic to a particular tweet, etc. The quality of the conversations is more important than the quantity. However, this is a topic for another post.
Thanks again to Brian Solis and Jeff Nolan.
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