If you are one of the 175 million people currently using Twitter then you know the power of social networking. Or do you?
It’s so important that you measure your efforts to see if your Twitter strategy is working. A great way to do this is to measure the click-through rates of your tweets. A great tool for this is Bit.ly where you can create a free account.
In addition to being a URL shortener that allows you to take those long web links and make them small for Twitter, Bit.ly has some other very clever features too. You can actually measure and track the click-through of every single URL that you tweet. If you are tweeting your blog posts, copy the link to your post, paste it in Bit.ly to shorten it and then Bit.ly will track how many people are interested enough in your tweet to click-through onto your blog. So you can see the effectiveness very easily. Because if you’re putting out tweet after tweet after tweet with a link in it and nobody is clicking on it, you need to be tweeting something differently or you need to be in front of different people. And you need to know that quickly and be able to act on that.
A new report this week from SocialTwist shows that Twitter is one of the best places to promote your items with an average of 19.04 clicks per tweet compared to Facebook’s average of only 2.87 clicks! So, remember this average when you review your Bit.ly results and don’t get disillusioned if you see that only a few people are clicking on your links. If you get no clicks, you probably need to think about changing your strategy.
Some things to consider if your results are lower than you would like; changing the times of your tweets and reviewing what you are sending. Timing can make a difference so test different days and times and review your results in Bit.ly, maybe your followers click more on Monday and Wednesday mornings, once you know this you can plan accordingly. Also review your messages, make them more compelling. Just writing “New on my blog, and a blog post title” may not get many clicks, but something like; “7 tips to help you double your business in 60 days” could make a HUGE difference.
If you aren’t measuring your Twitter strategy yet, take a few minutes to create and implement a measurement plan so you can improve your tweets, get more followers, and more business too!
Don’t forget to follow me on Twitter @nicolabird, hope to “see” you there.
