3 Ways Twitter Analysis Can Enhance Your Marketing

By: Nathan Hangen

Twitter is a powerful marketing tool.  But have you considered using the power of Twitter to enhance marketing efforts — social media or not?  This article will show you how.

Most people talk about Twitter in terms of getting to know people, building lists and using followers.  But for marketers and business owners, that’s just the start.

The Laser Focus of Twitter

One of the reasons I prefer Twitter to Facebook is that it’s much more focused, and in that regard, is much more business-oriented. As opposed to Facebook, where business and social are separated by pages and profiles, Twitter combines it all together in an easy-to-follow format. Better yet, the discussion and feedback loop occurs in real time, which means that you can achieve instant results.

So what does this mean, and why is it so important?

Imagine waking up every morning to a room full of fans, peers, and associates. How would you react? What if they were waiting for you to say something?

Would you just talk about the weather, or would you say something more meaningful?

Let’s imagine that this happened every day, and that each day you had the same opportunity to speak to these people. Sure, some have left, and there are some new faces, but each day the dynamic remains the same.

If you were smart, you’d probably improve your daily speech to a point that you cancaptivate most of the room with little effort, so that you could move them to action.

Every tweet you send is a chance for you to hone your approach to your audience in a way that increases your ROI and ROE (Return on Engagement, or Effort, take your pick). Furthermore, thanks to the analytic features of most URL shortening services, you can track what people are clicking on, over time, in a way that works just like split-testing would with direct response advertising.

How to Use Twitter Analysis

#1: Add a Plus to bit.ly Links

If you’ve been using TweetDeck or another Twitter service that uses bit.ly links, then here’s a great tip:

Go through your timeline and pull out bit.ly links, paste them into your browser, and add a “+” on the end. This will automatically send you to the bit.ly statistics page for that link, which gives you conversation history, clicks and regional analysis.

Not only is this a great way to yank out and measure the effectiveness of your tweet history, but it also gives you the opportunity to analyze your competitors!

Want to know how well someone else’s tweets are faring? Pull out the “+” and you’re in business.

#2: Split-Test Tweet Headlines

Now that we’ve pulled out some of your old tweets, let’s test them against some fresh ones. Take a look at what didn’t work, and think about how you can play with the content in order to create a new test.

You’ve only got 140 characters to work with, so you have to be concise. This works in your favor because it simplifies your message in the same way an AdWords headline does. Simple is good.

Try an old link with a new headline and see what happens. Did more people click this time or last? When did most people click? Which people click on everything, and which don’t?

Asking (and answering) these types of questions can give you insight on how to market your business in the social media space, especially if you continue to split-test against winning headlines.

#3: Split-Test Time Zones

Using headline split-tests, you’ll quickly learn how to approach your followers in a way that encourages them to respond, but what about followers in different time zones? How do you handle that?

Using any Twitter scheduling service, you can easily learn when your tweets are most effective. Simply schedule the same tweet (using a different link) throughout different parts of the day. Maybe start with every 4-6 hours, and then refine your approach as the data comes in.

You might learn that even though you tweet from the U.S., your biggest response comes from Australia when it’s your evening and their morning. If that’s the case, you can adjust your online interaction in a way that corresponds to when you have the greatest impact, and if that can’t be done, then you can simply schedule your Tweets to repeat throughout the day.

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