Chapter 6

T (Track): Making Sure You've Hit Your Mark

In this final step of the T.W.E.E.T. model, we'll look at the importance of Tracking to measure your target and to see the progress you are making or the areas in which you need to improve.

Do You Remember Your Target?

As we explored in Chapter Two, there are three main types of Targets that non-profits typically set for themselves on Twitter: an information account like @roomtoread (which is an information hub for global literacy), a personalized account like @johnwoodr2r (the Room to Read CEO's personal take on his life as the CEO of a large non-profit), and a fundraising account, like @twestival.

In the T.W.E.E.T. model, there are two steps to tracking your progress toward these Targets.

Step 1

After you identified your Target in Chapter Two, I asked you to choose five things you aimed to accomplish with your Target within six months.

It's time to look back at that list and see how you're doing. Did you meet any of these goals yet? Did any of these goals become irrelevant in the interim? Do the goals you set six months ago have a bearing on your current work? Looking at these earlier goals is a subjective, qualitative, but eye-opening experience. I hope that six months has been enough time for you to truly test out your strategy, but if you think you haven't given yourself enough time yet, simply wait a bit longer to track your progress again. After all, we're looking for improvement toward excellence, not self-flagellation.

Step 2

After analyzing these specific goals you set for your account, we can now move onto more general metrics. The three main steps in the T.W.E.E.T. model—Write, Engage, Explore—serve as metric points in the tracking process. We can use each of these points to better judge exactly how effective a given account is. Here are some ideas of how to turn these guiding lights into specific, measurable points you can track to judge progress. To avoid overwhelm, choose a few metrics within each category that best apply to your organization that you'd like to track, and work on monitoring your progress in those metrics over time. Additionally, recognize that not all of these will be particularly relevant for every organizational account on Twitter, so ignore ones you think may not apply to you.

Potential Metric Points to Measure:

Write

• Number of Tweets per day/week/month
• Number of retweets sent
• Most retweeted Tweet
• Response to different types of Tweets
• Best Tweet
• Percentage of retweets sent to original Tweets
• Percentage of Tweets with media links
• Percentage of Tweets with photos
• Percentage of Tweets linking to organization website
• Percentage of Tweets linking to outside articles
• Existing memes
• Failed memes

Engage

• Number of followers
• Number of following
• Number of retweets about your organization (analyze what was retweeted, when, and why)
• Number of @replies
• Number of @mentions
• Number of DMs
• Reach of a Tweet
• Follower growth rate
• Follower drop-off rate
• Most engaged day of the week
• Most engaged time of the day
• Number of lists on which your organization is placed as a list member

Explore

• Number of lists following (lists your organization is following)
• Number of lists created (lists your organization created)
• Size and growth of lists created
• Mentions per day
• Retweets by influencers
• Reaction to retweets by influencers
• Press mentions of Twitter account (your Twitter handle should be included in articles about your organization, for example)
• Percentage of followers made up of “influencers”
• Number of influencers actively followed on your private “public relations” list
• New relationships created

Let's use these metric suggestions to examine what it means to track the three main Targets that organizational accounts typically set on Twitter: information accounts, personalized accounts, and fundraising accounts.

Tracking an Information Account

After reviewing the questions you set for yourself to see where you stand six months after implementing your Target, it's time to move on to the standard metrics in the T.W.E.E.T. model—Write, Engage, Explore. Here are some of the common issues that come up in these metric points for information accounts.

• Write: Quality, Activity—An information account needs to remember to avoid creating too many updates, as that can lead to unfollows. It is also a good idea for information accounts to test slight increases in their information updates. For example, if @roomtoread currently sends ten Tweets per week, a good metric to explore would be whether or not their followers respond positively or negatively when they increase the number of Tweets sent by 30 to 50 percent. Many information accounts will also want to review their content to make sure they are keeping on track. Like @roomtoread, which sought to be a comprehensive information account about global literacy, many information accounts may be accompanied by secondary organizational accounts that have a different focus, like @johnwoodrtr, who aims to keep his Room to Read account more personal. Because information accounts are sometimes difficult to keep up due to the quantity of relevant information needed, it is easy for some information accounts to morph into personalized accounts. Make sure that if, say, your followers began following you because they want information on refugee transition programs in San Francisco, they don't end up finding that all your organizational Tweets are about your CEO's travels.
• Engage: Activity, Modes of Interaction—Engagement is simple to track numerically, and it is tempting for information accounts to track retweets of their informative messages. But a word of caution: information accounts should remember that it is not merely the volume of retweets, but the distance they travel that will make the difference in the long run.
• Explore: Followers, Position, Growth—Although an account with any of the three main account targets (information, personalized, fundraising) can map follower growth, it is especially important for information accounts and personalized accounts to do so. Given the nature of their Tweets, these accounts are a better barometer of true growth than fundraising accounts, which balloon and shrink based on whether they are engaged in a particular campaign. Because information accounts often have the best chance of being top of mind for journalists, mapping an account's increasing connections with influencers is an important metric as well.

Tracking a Personalized Account

Accounts aiming for personalization also need to evaluate how they are doing. Here are some of the ways the three standard metrics in the T.W.E.E.T. model can be applied to evaluation of a personalized account:

• Write: Quality—Personalized accounts are often the most likely to not include media, links, and the like. For this reason, it's important to remember to add these in. Although followers tend to be more forgiving with frequent updates on personalized accounts, you should also look out for this, as some personalized accounts find that they are tweeting a bit too much for their followers' liking.
• Engage: Retweets, @Replies: Engagement in the form of @replies and retweets is an important part of tracking engagement for personalized accounts. Because it can be harder for personalized accounts to get retweets and @replies than it is for fundraising or information accounts, personalized accounts should try different tactics to lure followers into interacting. This is also an important place to watch out for the potential of integrating blogs or a dynamic homepage link. Personalized accounts are less likely to include links, so such additions can disconcert some followers at first. However, for long-term organizational success, integrating in more links will help up interest in the work of the non-profit.
• Explore: Position, Growth—Personalized accounts can be harder to grow, so looking at growth is an important metric to watch. Although information accounts easily place themselves on many lists, and fundraising accounts are preprogrammed for viral campaigns that will secure a certain number of followers, personalized accounts rely on the voice of the individual at the organization to maintain interest. Personalized accounts should keep an eye on how growth changes based on different tactics they use to try to gain followers.

Tracking a Fundraising Account

• Write: Quality, Activity—Fundraising accounts face particular challenges with regularity and expectations. Firstly, they need to be sure to manage followers' expectations for what will happen when a particular campaign ends. Secondly, they need to prevent the account from going dormant when not in heavy promotion mode. Fundraising accounts will have weeks or months of higher activity (during a holiday fundraising push) and months with less activity (the middle of summer). It's important to work on improving during the holding pattern times.
• Engage: Activity, Dollars Raised—During any campaign, activity is one of the critical metrics, and for a fundraising campaign, dollars raised is a huge factor in engagement. Did the Tweets directly spur the followers to take the necessary action? This is a straightforward metric to track, for better or for worse.
• Explore: Followers, Position, Growth—For accounts that are interested in fundraising, follower growth can be trickier to track. Although (for the most part) the more followers one has, the better, there are other factors to consider. More followers will mean more eyeballs, but the issue with fundraising accounts is that they often grow during intense campaign times when individuals follow an account for the sole purpose of being part of a viral campaign—and not because they are necessarily genuinely interested in the account. For this reason, I think a more accurate metric for fundraising accounts is to ensure that their drop-off rate (that is, unfollowers) in the weeks following a big push are not too high, and that this rate goes down with each new campaign.

See an up-to-date list on the best ways to accept donations on Twitter at http://twitter4good.com/resources/processing-donations/

Tools to Track Effectively

To track effectively, you need access to the tools to do so. I asked Deanna Zandt, media technologist and author of Share This! How You Will Change the World Through Social Networking, about her three favorites:

• Rowfeeder
• Favstar
• Backtweets

As Zandt says, “Rowfeeder is a new one that I just love. Amazing metrics and extremely valuable for the price. Favstar is helpful for monitoring both people adding a Tweet as a favorite, and retweeting (new style). Backtweets is another great tool—you can put in a URL, and no matter what it was shortened with, it'll show you who's tweeted it.” Beth Kanter, author of The Networked Nonprofit, agrees that Rowfeeder is great—especially for events. She adds Twitalyzer to the list as a great way to measure the efficacy of your Tweets. Kevin Weil, product lead of revenue at Twitter, adds, “Twitter's advertising products, including Promoted Accounts and Promoted Tweets, can do a fantastic job of increasing your Twitter followers and helping to spread the word about your cause. Moreover, advertisers on Twitter can take advantage of advertiser-only, real-time analytics about their campaigns and accounts that measure their reach and ROI in a granular way.” For those who aren't advertising, Weil says, “CoTweet can be an easy way to manage and analyze Twitter campaigns.”

See a regularly updated list of the best tracking tools at http://twitter4good.com/resources/tracking-tools/

Finally, remember that tracking is about measuring results—but not necessarily quantitatively. Stories about the power of Twitter can be just as powerful in determining if your Twitter strategy is working. Marlon Parker is a social entrepreneur and mobile enthusiast passionate about using technology for social uplifting and empowerment. This passion was the reason for starting the non-profit Reconstructed Living Lab (RLabs), a social revolution enterprise using innovation and technology to bring about positive change in South Africa and beyond.

Becoming Streamlined

Streamlining is an essential part of the tracking plan. Once you have a system that is working, try to reduce the work involved so that you can get maximum results from minimal time output.

At the end of my training presentations, I used to show a slide meant to convey the concept of streamlining. I manage multiple accounts, and with each account I follow the T.W.E.E.T. model laid out in this book. As a result, I have all manner of lists and saved searches for each of my Twitter profiles to keep up with Targeting, Writing, Engaging, Exploring, and Tracking. To me, my social media dashboard system is simple. To some audience members, however, it could not have been more terrifying. (Needless to say, I stopped using that slide.)

If you're a newbie used to following only your mom and your cat, the T.W.E.E.T. model will be more of a challenge than it is to social media veterans. Over time, though, you will find that you can streamline it such that you are spending the same amount of time on full social media immersion that you used to spend tracking Mom's and Fluffy's movements.

For some individuals, streamlining will mean outsourcing this work to someone else. The individual best poised to do the tweeting on behalf of your organization is typically someone within your organization. However, if this is not possible and you need to hire out for this, there are a couple of best practices to remember.

Firstly, ensure that you know what you are hiring for. If you are hiring someone to do the labor involved (the manual act of tweeting, @replying, and the like), do not hire someone who has his or her own fixed visions of what your Twitter target and strategy should be. Although there are many social media consultants who can help you develop an excellent Twitter target, this must be in done in tandem with the organization. In short, don't let go of the reins entirely. Have a plan, and make sure any outside hire sticks to it.

Deanna Zandt has worked with many organizations seeking to hire for this role, and she has served as this outsider herself many times in managing the accounts of other organizations. She is firm about the importance of outside consultants empowering the organization with the skills to work on their own in the future.

For the most part, I'm of the “teach them to fish” school of consulting: I want my clients to absorb as much of my skills and knowledge as they can while they have me. Thus I make every effort to train and guide them into their own tweeting, if they're not doing it already. That said, there are certain campaigns where having an extra set of hands on deck to help with tweeting is useful—especially when there are huge time constraints and an organization's staff has to be focused on multiple prongs of the campaign's overall strategy. In that case, I spend a fair amount of time running potential Tweets by the client before the campaign gets going. This is really useful for them to see my style, and for me to understand theirs.

For example, one client of hers told her their brand didn't want to use exclamation points! Although that may have seemed a bit too specific, Zandt said, “It was true, and very helpful for me,” adding, “Other than that, they pretty much trust me. I have a strong background in branding, and I think that helps me absorb the organizational voice quickly.” She admitted that there are definite cons to the arrangement at times, and organizations should be aware of what it means to have an outsider come in: “The downsides are that it does take away from the authenticity of the conversation a little bit. It's almost like the difference between going to the Verizon store and going to the Authorized Reseller Verizon store. It's just not the same experience, no matter how good the consultant/freelancer is at quickly joining a team.”

If the best way for your organization to maintain maximum efficacy is to hire an outside consultant to carry on your tweeting strategy, you should absolutely go ahead and do so. Just remember the importance of understanding and staying in control of the account's direction.

See more tips on hiring someone to help your organization with Twitter at http://twitter4good.com/resources/hiring-twitter-help/

Top Questions on the “Track” Step