Tag Social Media

Twitter quietly launches access to account analytics

Twitter Analytics

I read this morning on Christopher Penn’s blog that Twitter had finally launched their own analytics platform — or, at least, made access to account analytics public, though you have to do some digging to get to them.

To access, click the gear icon from your Twitter timeline and select Twitter Ads. Once you’re logged into the Ads platform, you’ll see an Analytics drop-down menu in the top left corner. Click it, select Timeline Activity, and many curiosities will be met. Well, curiosities if you’re also a metrics / numbers nerd like myself. 🙂

The screenshot I included with this post is of my own analytics on @sarahwefald. Nothing too impressive there, though I am impressed with the reach multipliers Twitter tells me I’ve received. I spend most of my time on social media working on building the accounts and brands of my clients, so my relatively small numbers make sense to me.

If you want to get very granular with your Twitter data, this will not be the tool for you. You’ll still need Crowdbooster or equivalent if you want to find out the best times and days for you to post. Enterprise-level analytics companies shouldn’t be shaking in their boots just yet.

So, I guess it goes without saying that if you need me today, I’ll be pulling up the official analytics for all my clients’ accounts.

36 rules of social media

Fast Company asked social media power users for their rules of engagement, and Mediabistro’s AllTwitter turned it into a handy infographic. Did they miss any of your rules?

While I agree with the overarching theme that it’s high time to stop treating social media as a broadcast platform and more like a conversation platform, I don’t think it’s impossible to have a monetization strategy that provides a good consumer experience at the same time.

Why email still matters

Working with bands isn’t that far off from working with small businesses: budgets are tight, and while stakeholders understand that all things online will help their business, they’re frequently looking for ways to get the job done as quickly and simply as possible so they can get back to what they’re best at doing. This is why a lot of businesses and brands stopped growing and updating email newsletter lists in favor of growing followings on Facebook and Twitter.

The problem with having your fans and customers on platforms you don’t own, however, is that you don’t own the online relationship with your fans and customers. This idea started coming home for many of us working in social media at the end of September, when suddenly each post only reached a fraction of the fans we had been reaching — that is, unless we pay to “promote” each post. So how do you continue to reach your customers? Email.

It’s never too late to start an email list if you don’t have one already. MailChimp is a great tool to with a full-functional free version for lists up to 2,000 people. Aweber is a great platform that makes it easy to send mail to highly segmented lists, but I’ve found that for most small business applications, it’s a little more power than necessary.

There are many more email platforms out there, so I encourage you to do some research and see what works best for your needs.