I was having a conversation with @wimrampen and we began discussing how I measure my “success” on twitter. I started with a baseball analogy at which point I realized Wim and I were speaking different languages.
In order to understand my definition of success it is first critical that you understand my goals for Twitter:
- Increase personal value. While hard to measure, the goals related to this include interview requests (for blogs, papers, etc..), board seats (anyone interested?), job offers (I am happy at Swimfish but always good to feel love), etc..
- Increase profitability of Swimfish. Easier to measure in terms of partnerships established, new sale opportunities, helping customers, and potential customers, better understand how to improve their business. All of these interactions will ultimately lead to a more profitable company.
Clearly every conversation is not about the items above, nor should they be. However, my initial reasons for joining Twitter are listed above.
How do I measure success? Ultimately, of course, it comes down to how well I am doing against the goals listed above. I truly enjoy the conversations and love being part of a rich and growing community. While the goals above remain important just getting to know people has also been a great value add.
Okay, I have shown you my sinister nature by revealing some of my goals. How do I measure how well I am doing in moving along the path to achieving these goals? I use John’s Twitter Engagement Index. If CoTweet, PeopleBrowsr, or some other Twitter client adds this index I will switch immediately.
- Twitter success begins with interactions. RTs, DMs, discussions. The more the better.
- My index is similar to American Baseball’s slugging percentage with these formulas:
Engagement Points
RTs: 0.5 Point
DMs: 1 Points
Dialog: 2 Points per response
index = (Total Engagement Points per week)/(Total Members in my Community [followers])
-
- RTs are often not true engagement, I count these for the least points.
- A DM is often a person connection, although some of these are obvious SPAMMY. However, I count these as having more value then an RT.
- When I am having longer dialogs with a single person, that is a high quality dialog.
- Here is an example:
- A user has 100 followers.
- They have 10 items RT’d in a week. (5 engagement points)
- They have 5 DMs in a week. (5 engagement points)
- They engage in dialog 20 times over the course of the week. (40 engagement points)
- Total engagement points would be 50. The index would be 50%, a really good engagement index!
Clearly this is too cumbersome to handle manually as your community scales, but this is the basic concept I use to see if I am on track with engagement targets; targets that I believe will help me achieve my broader goals.
What do you think?
John
August 2, 2009 at 3:14 am
You can’t feed a family on tweets. Yes, it is about relationships, but ultimately the relationships have to come back to money. Respectfully, why spend the time to measure “engagement” if there is no demonstrable value at the end of the day? Do you measure engagement with “real” friends? No. So why do it here unless you think there will be a monetary benefit? : )
August 2, 2009 at 12:29 pm
Mark, you’re right that you cannot feed a family on tweets and ultimately it will come down to money. However, social platforms are generally not going to result in immediate sales or reduced costs, they are an investment that will pay dividends, and pay for themselves, in time.
Focus on the relationships first, you will build a loyal community that will support you when customers have questions about your product (reducing support costs, raising your brand awareness) and help you in making sales (as they recommend you to their networks).
John
July 31, 2009 at 7:11 pm
[...] John’s Twitter Engagement Index – John Moore [...]
July 24, 2009 at 8:14 pm
[...] John’s Twitter Engagement Index [...]
July 24, 2009 at 7:43 pm
Very interesting post, John. I think your formula is a correct approach to easily measure Twitter engagement. RTs, DMs and dialogs are the things I look every week to give my #followfriday recommendations.
Overcomplicating things, it would be great to know the number of unique followers who read our tweets, but I think this is only measurable with tweets that contain links to other pages.
Thank you and good job!
July 24, 2009 at 7:48 pm
Thanks Francisco. I do feel that this can be made far more accurate, which I’m likely going to do in a Google Wave experiment soon, but for now I prefer keeping it simple (as I can see you do as well).
Thanks for weighing in, I always value your input.
John
July 23, 2009 at 3:47 pm
The fact that I am a baseball fan, this formula goes over well with me!
For the past 4 years I have justified, justified & justified even more what the ROI is of social media (“emerging media” to corporations now) – and with the brilliance of my husband & his spreadsheet craftsmanship came up with a table that measures your output/behaviors (engagement on Twitter, blogs along with ones participation on other platforms such as LinkedIn, forums etc etc) & measures it against what your goals are and how they are affected. (how much does the phone ring? what is your conversion rate? What is your cost per customer? etc etc).
That was a mouth full – sorry…exciting though when you can FINALLY truly measure SM & go to the CEO & say “see…told ya so!”
Happy Thursday!
-jen
July 23, 2009 at 4:18 am
I am just trying to use twitter. This infor was very useful. Thank you John.
July 22, 2009 at 11:07 am
Great suggestions. I will start implementing today with the following modifications. Different diaglog categories:
email – 2
phone – 2.5
in person – 3 or 3rd base
Becomes a client. collaborator, source of referrals, etc – Home Run
Also agree w/John Moore’s suggestion that we need to look at the investment side.
Thanks for tweeking my brain this A.M.
July 22, 2009 at 12:18 pm
Thanks for the feedback Anne. Do you use a CRM system today and will you be someone adding this to your CRM or will it be something you are doing manually?
No, I am not trying to sell you anything.
Just interested in what your approach will be.
John
July 22, 2009 at 2:17 am
[...] This post was Twitted by jerbuen [...]
July 22, 2009 at 1:19 am
John – In general, I like your metrics. Someone will always have a better metric, or will show why theirs are better. I like yours, simple and to the point. Here is the flip side (I am in a contrarian mood)
What is the opportunity cost? How much time do you (did you) spend to get where you are? Is this the most efficient use of time?
There are the contrarian questions – but interestingly, I believe you will have good answers that will strengthen your case and this discussion. I have a visceral sense that it works, but metrics are good. I have taken the same approach as you, and met great people – yourself included.
BTW – need to add points for phone call that would not have happened and face-to-face in a foreign country!
-Mitch
July 22, 2009 at 1:36 am
You hit upon a key metric that I noted to Brian (in the comments) is missing from this. The # of tweets sent really needs to be added as this is the cost and my formula represents the “revenue” from Twitter.
Unfortunately, I do not yet have the cost factored in so I cannot provide real ROI, but will say the following:
- Through Twitter I have had partnership discussions with more than 10 companies, none of which I would have met otherwise.
- Through Twitter I have met great people (yourself included) and have had the pleasure to be invited to conferences and have done an interview or two.
- Through Twitter I have “raised awareness” of my brand and of Swimfish’s….
Now, was this the most cost-effective method?
- For personal branding, yes by far. The open nature of twitter beats Facebook and LinkedIn to tell the “story” of who you are.
- For corporate branding I “feel” that this is more cost effective than e-mail blasts, SEO, etc.. as you are able to grow a community of like minded individuals which you are unable to do effeciently with other platforms.
Within a month I’ll have enough data to tell you what my monthly “cost” of this approach is. I will need more time to establish a real “profit” value as a month is too short to be accurate.
Would people find it interesting if I started posting monthly cost vs. monthly revenue for my personal and corporate efforts?
John
July 21, 2009 at 11:17 pm
Hi John,
Great post. Thanks for opening up the dialogue. I use CoTweet, HootSuite, and PeopleBrowsr all for different reasons depending on what I need to accomplish for my client. Based on what you are describing, PeopleBrowsr will provide the closest feature/functionality that you are looking for in a client.
PeopleBrowsr recently updated to version 1.07. Don’t bother with the AIR app, stick with the Browser version. In Business mode, you can click on the avatar in the tweet and select Follow, Favorite, Group, Note, VIP, Email, Plaxo, Rate. Scheduling tweets and being able to switch between Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Plaxo, FriendFeed, is something that no other client application can do. The only drawback to PeopleBrowsr is that they have the Twitter API on their server which means your TweetDeck might update 2-4 minutes faster, however you have a less chance of reaching the 150 API limit on PeopleBrowsr.
(Note: When scheduling tweets to Twitter and Facebook, the associated Facebook account will automatically update where as the tweet will go out as scheduled.)
CoTweet is a solid and simple solution with scheduling features but currently cannot link to any other social channels. You can assign Twitter followers to other CoTweet users, but there are no notes, VIP, or Plaxo linking capabilities. You can sync your Bit.ly account for tracking clicks, but that is as far as it goes.
HootSuite does offer Twitter and Facebook link through Ping.fm (this can feed other social channels if you wish) and you can schedule tweets to for both channels. However, the URL shortner Ow.ly has some resistance because of the annoying banner across the page when visitors click through.
Seesmic is a great client but has the same drawbacks as CoTweet. The most recent update has caused many users to go back to TweetDeck. I have had several friends report that it crashes more often than before the update.
I hope this gives your readers some good insight into the other Twitter clients out right now. Again, I think for the “John Engagement Index” process, you will find the most benefit from PeopleBrowsr.
July 22, 2009 at 1:06 am
Outstanding review of some major twitter clients. I have not used PeopleBrowsr in a while so will go back and check it out.
July 21, 2009 at 10:53 pm
John,
I like it. Thanks for peeling back the onion and showing what’s underneath – very cool.
You may also want to check out http://www.twitalyzer.com and http://twitter.grader.com – They have come up with their own metrics for analyzing “Twitter Success”.
How do you calculate your “score” each week? Why don’t you have your team write a little app?
July 22, 2009 at 1:04 am
Thanks Brian. Right now I am still calculating the score weekly using an Excel spreadsheet. The main reason for this, and not having my team write an application yet, is that the formula is still a work in progress (sad, but true). The other dimensions I need to think through include:
- Number of tweets I send per week.
- Number of individuals I tweet with.
I am continuing to play with this and then will move onto the more interesting piece: How these metrics drive actions/recommendations.
The folks at Twitalyzer have done a great job in analyzing metrics. I am hoping they will take the next logical step and turn these metrics into actionable recommendations.
John
July 21, 2009 at 10:20 pm
YOu make some great points, and indeed what you say has relevance, you have to have goals, but at the same time there’s this substance of interaction that is happening that just makes you feel good as a human being interacting.
I have seen an increase in my goals which were to interact, to share, to contributes and to of course increase exposure to my service and value offering, the question though is, are you adapting to the new way of thinking or trying to find what twitter is with old way of thinking,
times have changed and they will keep changing with new ways of interacting and doing business, twitter has set the stage for this,
and if you can align your goals to the new paradigm then you will successfully get your goals achieved.
July 22, 2009 at 1:01 am
Well said Spiro, thanks for the comments.