Disclosure: Brian is a cofounder of TweetROI, a twitter-based social advertising network. As such, he is uniquely qualified to discuss publisher network systems then ensure twitterer quality.
Don't buy low ROI tweets and end up like "Homeless Bill"
(photo by jswieringa)
The Twitter Advertising Space Is Growing
There are now at least four companies competing for advertising dollars in the very young twitter advertising channel: IZEA, Be-A-Magpie, RevTwt, and TweetROI. Each system is quite different in terms of how the advertiser gets matched up with the twitterer (publisher). When deciding where to spend your money, consider this...
How do you predict what kind of results you'll get from the twitterers that tweet your messages?
There are four questions you must ask yourself if you want to get good Twitter social-advertising results:
- What goals do you hope to achieve with a social advertising network on Twitter?
- What are the right metrics for your buzz marketing plan?
- What obstacles must you overcome?
- What's the solution to these obstacles?
What Goals Do You Hope To Achieve Via A Twitter Social-Advertising Network?
- Awareness
- Retweets
- Traffic
- Results (sales, leads, signups)
Which you choose depends on your orientation. A PR firm might be most interested in awareness and reach. Direct marketers will want to look for more concrete results like sales and leads.
What Are The Right Metrics For Your Twitter Buzz Marketing Plan?
These are similar metrics to what you'll use for PR or direct marketing, and the metric depends on your goal.
- Impressions
- Reach
- Retweets
- Replies
- Sales/leads/signups
- Cost per sales/lead/signup
- ROI
What Obstacles To Good Social Marketing Must You Overcome?
- Low reach
- Low engagement
- Low virality
- Low clickthrough rates
- Low ROI
You don't want to pay thousands of dollars to tweet via twitterers with thousands of followers but end up with just a handful of clicks to your website. Don't be misled- it's easy to get a lot of followers. It takes work and passion to get a consistent response from them.
The more retweets your twitter spokespeople get, the more clicks you'll get. The more engaged a twitterer's followers are, the more clicks you'll get. And the more clicks you get from the tweets, the lower your cost per click will be. That means a more viral and engaged twitter spokesperson gets you a better ROI on your twitter advertising.
What's The Solution? High Quality, Distributed Website Spokespeople
You need a system that ensures that the twitterers you use as spokespeople are engaged with their followers. That's the quality part. Distributed means you want a bunch of high quality spokestweeters passing on your message.
How do we predict if a twitterer gets results? TweetROI uses a system of UserRanks (each on a scale of 1-10) to measure twitterers by:
- Reach (Overall UserRank)
- Engagement (ConversationRank)
- Virality (ViralRank)
- Talkativeness (TalkRank)
_
For example: My ViralRank and ConversationRank are each only 4/10 compared to all twitterers, but I have more than 30,000 followers.
Some valuable insights that UserRanks provide are:
- Many Twitterers have thousands of followers but have only ConversationRank 1/10 and ViralRank 1/10 because they receive no replies or retweets at all from these followers.
- Twitterers with ConversationRanks and ViralRanks of 1 are either spam profiles or new Twitterers that can't help you market.
- One of our users with less than 100,000 followers gets 75% as many retweets as @aplusk does with his 3 million plus followers. Don't get distracted by number of followers.
The Bottom Line: You Need Twitterer-Quality Metrics
No matter how many followers a twitterer has, you need to look at their power to get retweets and replies, relative to other twitterers. That's what TweetROI's UserRanks tell you.
TweetROI's advanced bidding feature allows you to pay-per-tweet proportional to any of the four UserRanks. That helps you predict a higher ROI ahead of time. Quality twitterers yield more clicks and better quality site visitors.
And that's the way to ensure the best ROI on a Twitter social advertising network.
Brian Carter is a cofounder of TweetROI; Director of SEO, PPC, and Social Media for Fuel Interactive and The Brandon Agency; and a funny keynote speaker you can see in November 2009 at Pubcon.