Track success of the twitter campaign

I was in discussion with one of my colleagues when this question of how to track success of the twitter campaign cropped up. This made me compile my ideas about tracking the tweeter campaign. This also serves the purpose of base to decide how much of your time for social media should be devoted towards this micro blogging ( or nano expression as Praveen calls it) site.

Tracking requirements for twitter really and actually depends on your objective to use twitter. Your objective could be creating a buzz, generating traffic to your website or blog. In fact the objective behind twitter usage would keep changing during the life cycle of your campaign if the same is extended over 2 month. So when your campaign is starting your objective is to gain as many followers as possible. This means that over a period of first month the tracking requirements are limited to how many followers you are gaining day over day. When we talk about the number of follower not only the people joining your network are important but people leaving it are equally important. If you map the people joining / leaving your network against the particular tweets send out during that duration you can get a fair good idea about their interest to achieve their goal. You can realign your tweets to target right people.

Once you have achieved the critical mass of the follower your goal could be either creating buzz about your service / company or generating more traffic for your website. Retweets and hash tags are two good tools which can be used for these. Thus it becomes absolutely mandatory to map how many people are contributing towards your hash (#) tags or how many are retweeting your tweets. You also have to bear in mind that to allow people to retweet your posts you would have to limit your post length so that it can accommodate RT @ name. Believe me if people have to take pain in compressing your ports, its going to reduce the RTs to a significantly low number. A map of numbers of a significantly low number. A map of numbers of # or RTs against your tweet content is a good tool to correct and realign your tweets with your goals.

Twitter is a good tool for any social networking campaign but it can easily be a reason for wasting your valuable time for sweet nothing. If we track our campaigns through these maps we can reduce the time devoted to such campaign to less than an hour a day and that is what we cant to achieve