Measuring Twitter ROI
I’m putting the final touches on the slides for workshop teaching some PR pros about how add social media into the PR mix. One of the questions I’ve been asked to address is “How do you measure Twitter ROI?”
Now for those of us heavily immersed in the tweeting world, the answer seems pretty obvious. Wasn’t there an article in Bloomberg.com just last week reporting that Dell attributes $1 million in sales to Twitter?
I suggest the following measures of ROI:
- Number of RTs, DMs and@s
- Brand, site or product mentions
- Reporter contacts
- Coupon redemptions
- Landing page conversions
- Stories published/aired
You’ll notice on this list number of followers is NOT included!
As for an example of the power of Tweet, I offer up one that happened just today. Yesterday I got a call from a friend at Wamu that Chase was going to pull the plug on it’s 86 year old School Savings program. Clearly this is a newsworthy story. As a parent of a school saver, I was not happy with this news. So I used my social media contacts via Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook to spread the word about the unfortunate decision. And while I’m sad to say that it doesn’t look like I’ll be able to save the program, at least I’m giving it a good send off.
Within 24 hours, my social media relationships served up a lead story in Seattle’s on-line news”paper” the Seattle Post Intelligencer and a radio news report (you can listen to the audio below). I think you’ll agree these are old school PR metrics that no one will argue with.
Futhermore, I’m not even in the business of pitching stories to the media these days. Imagine what a real flack could’ve accomplished with an established social media network!
Have I covered all of the performance metrics, or are there some I’ve missed? I’d love to hear from you how you measure your Twitter ROI!