O2

If you’re a business in 2011, there should really be someone in your office handling the social media presence of said business. If there isn’t, then you may find that a significant portion of your marketing budget is being wasted in an environment where the Twitter word-of-mouth nature of virally marketing a new product or service is a large part of many people’s average social media day.

The metrics that go along with Twitter, however, are somewhat harder to pin down, given that they’re prone to giving a misrepresentation of your company’s actual reach. Say you have ten thousand followers. While some less experienced Twitter users will assume this means their message is seen by ten thousand people, this isn’t strictly true.

Ten thousand see the message, yes, but some will be bots, some will have so many accounts on their follow list that they won’t even notice it as it flashes past, and you’ll realise that around half, if you’re lucky, are genuine people who want to see what you have to say. What you can measure, whether you’re tweeting about a company party or the aesthetics of O2, to some degree, is retweets and conversation.

People use Twitter – and by “people” I mean genuine people who don’t take part in “team follow-back” – to keep track of a company, or a person, or a band. If you tweet something and see fifteen retweets, don’t feel disappointed it wasn’t ten thousand – check those accounts out. If they’re genuine (i.e. not SEO “gurus”, bots or other online miscreants), thank them for the retweet, and engage in a little discussion. Then take a look at any new followers, and compare them to that person’s list of followers. Notice any accounts on both lists? That’s something you can measure – it’s called “influence.”

Klout offers an ideal set of metrics to help you analyse how you’re doing on Twitter – the chance of you being retweeted, what topics you’re influential about (although this is usually what topics you tweet most about), and who you influence the most. It’s also worth bearing in mind that people may not mention you by your username – do regular searches to see how many people are discussing you or your company without linking back to you, and read what they’re saying, as people might avoid mentioning your username if what they’re saying is critical or outright negative.