Twitter Lists to Followers Ratio: The new social media metric

Twitter has been aunching a slew of new functionality recently, most notably Twitter Lists. I say most notably because Twitter Lists addresses one of the most pressing problems with using Twitter.com as a primary Twitter client. It's very easy to follow so many people that you wind up really following no one. People's tweets just get lost in the stream.

Until now, I've solved that problem with 3rd party apps like Seesmic on my desktop and Tweetie on the iPhone that allow me to create groups of followers so I can filter down tweets to a manageable thread and actually keep tabs on the people I'm most interested in. Twitter Lists, however, allows me to do that right on Twitter.com and even better, share those lists with others. The lists I aggregate can become little tidbits of value I share with the masses.



That's really relevant to brands seeking a meaningful metric for how to measure the success of their social marketing programs. Just acquiring followers is really quite meaningless. It's relatively easy to do (follow a bunch of people and some subset will just follow you back), but says nothing about the relevance of those followers or if they are getting any value out of following you.

However, if someone adds you to a list, they are making a small, but conscious effort to say to the world, hey this dude's got some good tweets over here.

I propose that this will evolve into a truly meaningful metric for social marketing effectiveness. The more of your followers that put you on Lists, the more relevant and valuable your social media presence is. As of this moment, @adamkleinberg (that's me) has 1852 followers and I'm on 60 lists. That means I have a marginally respectable 3.2% List to Followers Ratio. This is a measure of my perceived relevant value on Twitter, and one I hope will improve over time.

There are holes in this theory of course. Take this Twitter thread for instance:

jack_benoff: @adamkleinberg but how many of your followers have even created lists?

adamkleinberg: Lists to Followers Ratio = new value metric for soc. media. Currently 3.2% of my followers think I'm valuable enuf 2 put on a list.

But even if this is brand new stuff and only active Twitterers use it, doesn't that add to the argument that it's a great metric to measure value of your Twitter presence? It's no secret that ninety-something percent of people on Twitter sign up, tweet once and disappear. Those aren't exactly valuable followers and they definitely aren't creating lists.

Stick that in your PowerPoint and guru it. As always, I love to hear your thoughts.

MC Hammer on Social Media Strategies

This post was written by guest blogger, Jim Reed

During Adweek's Social Media Strategies conference this week, keynote speaker MC Hammer told a childhood story about how he would walk to the Oakland Coliseum on game days from his Oakland neighborhood and watch 50,000+ people stream into the stadium. It didn't take long for him to realize that the likelihood of someone buying something from him was pretty good. He wound up selling popcorn, peanuts, soda, etc. but Hammer makes this analogy to a group of social media marketers because the odds are in the numbers. Facebook now has more than 300 million active users, so in the long run marketers are bound to sell something.



Social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are the latest toys for marketers to ponder, but the results are still to be determined. Conference panelists and speakers agreed that brands need to be on these platforms now because it takes time to gather a following, to get a stride, to see what works, and most importantly to provide a channel for your customers to reach out to you and hear from you. There was a lot of discussion about putting an actual human behind the tweets and status updates. Rather than a stiff corporate logo with carefully crafted copy for each tweet, consumers will identify more with a real person who can type with wit in real time. Dunkin Donuts has Dunkin Dave. Comcast, who has a notorious reputation for bad customer service, now has a guy name Frank answering customer complaints via Twitter. We at Traction have several humans chiming in (Adam, Theo, Renee, Kellie, Jim) – the point is to maintain a personal voice.

But what about Facebook? The big takeaway from Facebook is to remember that microsites are islands in the Internet – no one will visit your pretty microsite unless you spend great effort and great cost driving traffic to the site. So don't make a microsite experience on Facebook. Leverage the features inherent to social media by encouraging users to express themselves and share with their friends. At Traction we incorporate these strategies for our client, Adobe. On Facebook we encourage users to upload their own creative work, to participate in discussions, enter sweepstakes, and of course share content such as tutorials and interactive games.

Assessing free social media metrics tools

After the Social Media Analytics panel got cancelled at the Web 2.0 Expo yesterday, I decided to do a little panel discussion of my own on the various tools out there. Luckily, my pal Dave Smith over at Mediasmith did a presentation at iMedia Breakthrough a few weeks ago on "The Surprising Power of Social Media Metrics." I'm using that as a starting point for an outline along with a few options we've used along the way in this post.

First, the free stuff:

Twitter Search - OK, so this is pretty basic, but it is a useful tool for measuring conversation about your brand. I just ran a search and saw 19 posts in the last 24 hours about my client Alibaba.com. Certainly indicates that we should be thinking about their Twitter strategy.

TweetGrid - Calls itself a Twitter Search dashboard that updates in real time. You can basically monitor several keywords and they all show up in boxes and update dynamically. Useful, I guess if you have all day to sit around staring at an ugly dashboard, but the UX is gross. Not for me.

Twist - This is a nice site because it gives you a chart for 7 or 30 days of conversational activity on Twitter for a keyword. Great to paste into a report. The problem is that it measures in intervals of 100 tweets, so if there's not a ton of conversation going on, your chart looks like a flat line. They have potentially cool drag and drop functionality that let's you zoom in, but it was buggy when I checked it out.

Twilert - This is a great tool for marketers who want to have an effective Twitter conversational marketing strategy. They have advanced search features (all/any/none of these words, by hashtag, sender, receiver, geography, and ATTITUDE) , so you can get alerts of all the people having conversation about a given topic and respond to them. Something every social community manager could use for Twitter.

SamePoint - This is a great tool for monitoring conversations. Rather than just one social tool like Twitter, you can look at all social media or set filters. A quick search on Alibaba.com again gave me one column with results from across the social web (blogs, Wikipedia, LinkedIn, Digg, Facebook...) and a second column showed Tweets. They also have a search plug-in for browsers that are OpenSearch compliant. No reporting, unfortunately, but awesome for real-time monitoring.

SocialMention - I like this even better than SamePoint. The level of filtering isn't as great, but it's a nicer UI. They don't offer much in the way of reporting, but do have a "social rank" score and some top level summary of sources of mentions (i.e. 50 from blogsearch.google.com, 20 from technorati.com, 20 from wikio, etc.). What I really like is that they have an open API, the ability to look at trending keywords and you can export a spreadsheet. Bookmarking this one!

Google Alerts - Like everything Google does, it's simple, basic and works great. News and blog posts about specific keywords delivered to your Inbox. Been using this for years. Don't plan on stopping.

PostRank - P"ostRank measures engagement by analyzing the types and frequency of an audience's interaction with online content. " This is a tool that basically tracks the re-sharing based on any original feed. It's great for getting granular on who is sharing what and how (i.e. who Dugg, commented or Twittered about your blog post). They are launching an Analytics tool, but it's still under wraps. Nice UI on this site. Have high hopes for the Analytics tool.

Google Insights for Search - This is a great tool for measuring search volume and I think a very valid way of measuring interest over time and by region. It also allows you to see related searches to dig into those. Great charts to show how many are searching for a term and where. I would say that if I wanted a true measure of brand awareness—or actually brand interest—this is an ideal tool.

Technorati Chart - Technorati allows you to search for blogs on a specific keyword, but what I really think is neat from an analytics perspective is their chart tool that allows you to compare how conversations in the blogosphere measure up across terms. Not exactly robust analytics, but a useful tool that I'll definitely use in the future to make a point.

BlogPulse - These guys have a number of tools for monitoring conversation. First, they have Trend Results, which basically produces the exact same chart as Technorati. It also has a Conversation Tracker tool, but the results were crap. When I searched for 'adam kleinberg' on social mention, I got 10 pages of results. On BlogPulse, just a handful and none of them were any of the dozens of blog posts and articles I've written. Doesn't bode well in my book. Plus, these free tools just seem to be a come-on to upgrade to Nielsen Online's BrandPulse product.

Trendpedia - Again, this is just a repeat of the Technorati compare chart. I'm totally underwhelmed, however. Of the three, I'd go with Technorati because I trust their information.

Trendrr - At first glance, this seems like a more powerful tool than either of the above, because you can specify data sources and customize the reporting you get to a much more robust level. Unfortunately, it's a bit of a confusing interface. After fighting with the log-in panel for five minutes, I gave up. But I might come back. Maybe. We'll see.

Facebook Lexicon - You guessed it. Tracks conversations on Facebook. On Facebook Walls, specifically. Decent enough tool to stick a chart in a report, but not mind-blowing insights by any means either.

That's an assessment of some of the free tools out there. More to come...

Marketing with Twitter

The big Twit question I keep hearing people asking is "how are brands actually using Twitter?"

Here's a great one.

@nunzi @task is great. Check out Qtask if you need real accountability and online collaboration https://website.qtask.com/t... about 1 hour ago

I tweeted at a guy I know in response to a tweet he had made. This guy is searching for his competitors names in discussion threads on Twitter and hitting people to check out his thing. 

That's how.

Real or Fake?

Check out Traction's latest for Adobe's Facebook fan page: Is it REAL OR FAKE? Go play now.