All I Want for Christmas is Twitter Metrics
Okay. I also want a 62″ plasma TV, a top-notch DSLR and maybe a nice pair of sound isolating headphones. But right now we’re talking about Twitter metrics, damn it. Social networks like Twitter and Facebook are great for targeting and growing your audience, but the available tools just aren’t up to par yet. Followers? Following? So 2007. Number of mentions/retweets? List adds? That’s so… 2009. So I’ve put together a list of metrics that I haven’t seen tracked anywhere, but ones that would be much more useful than most of the key performance indicators currently available. Maybe in the Christmas (Hanukkah, Kwanzaa) spirit, Twitter will comply.
If you’re looking for tools that analyze and track currently-used metrics, take a look the list of web tools for twitter monitoring I put together last month.
So why a wishlist for Twitter Metrics? The control and amount of information that you have over your own blog or your own website vastly outweighs the information you have about your Twitter account. Even Facebook Fan pages have a decent amount of information relating to your pageviews, weekly comments, demographics, and more. Twitter really has nothing. We can’t blame them because they’re a private company and they don’t need to publish that information (let alone for free), but if brands are to continue to evolve on the platform, better key performance indicators are needed. So here’s a wishlist of Twitter systems of measurement, some simple, some more complex, some that can be created/hacked, and some that Twitter would have to integrate. What do you wish Twitter measured for you? What current metrics have you found most useful? I’d love to hear your feedback in the comments.
Unique Users
This is probably the most obvious thing and maybe the most frustrating thing that isn’t tracked by Twitter. How come we can’t easily measure how many people are visiting our own accounts (let alone measuring how many times certain individual tweets are viewed)? Wouldn’t this help a user to measure how well they are converting users? Maybe a high percentage of people that view their page follow. Maybe it’s a terribly low percentage. Right now we have no idea.
This information is currently not available, and would be extremely helpful in conjunction with the other available metrics like followers, retweets, mentions, etc. A basic suite of metrics, focusing on unique users, but including other measurements like pageviews and clickthroughs similar to what Facebook provides would be a perfect Christmas present for me.
ListTotal
Right now it’s extremely easy to see how many lists are following you. It shows up right on your Twitter page next to your followers and following. I have 25. But what’s the total number of people following the lists I’m on? Now I have to do some arithmetic. As of this post, I have 302 people following me due to the lists I’m on. Just think how much more important that is. Sure, anyone can game the system easily by adding someone to 50 lists, but if they only have 30 people following those lists, how useful is that?
This indicator not only measures Twitter list adds, but the interest in the lists you’re on. So if Robert Scoble adds you to his most-influential-in-tech list, it only counts as one add, but it counts as over 3,800 adds to your ListTotal. I haven’t seen this metric tracked really anywhere, but I can’t imagine it’s that difficult to measure. The biggest problem is that it gives list owners like Scoble a lot of responsibility. What if I decided to pay him $1,000 to add me to his list? How can that be stopped? Something to ponder. At the very least, it’d be nice to have as a secondary statistic to go with your normal “following”.
FollowerOrigin
For Twitter users (mainly brands) wishing to micromanage and measure their accounts, why can’t we measure the origin of our followers? Are they coming from a website (for those linking from their own homepage), or someone else’s tweetstream? From a Twitter Search? From somewhere else entirely? This is something that can easily be tracked on your own website using Google Analytics or a number of other free web traffic monitoring tools. Right now there’s no way a third party company could measure this, but if Twitter gave it out, it would be very cool.
From here, there are other logical places you can go - measure the entire clickstream of a user - where did they go after visiting your page? Did they visit your website? Maybe even eventually monitor every follower’s actions while following you and tie it to their Twitter ID - how often does an “average” user view your profile, what makes them unfollow, etc. But the Origin would be the logical and most useful starting point.
Demographics
I have no idea about the demographics of people that follow me or interact with me on Twitter (on average). But that would be incredibly useful. To do M/F, age and location splits of the people who a) follow me, b) interact (tweet, retweet) with me, c) view my page, and d) search for keywords would be awesome. Maybe on average, they’re the same, maybe they’re completely different. I really don’t know. But I’m curious.
What you found out that the people who search for “dog treats” on Twitter are 80% female? Would that change the way your company engaged people using that term? Or what if you realized that your Seattle-based company had only 25% of their followers from Washington State? Imagine how that would change the way you value your followers or even market to them. What if you found out that 60% of your followers are male, but 75% of the people who interacted with you (via RT, @mention) were women? It might change the content you provide. Twitter demographics could really revolutionize the way the platform is used. Eventually, Twitter could even build in a feature to only tweet out to local followers, or followers between 18-30 using easy segmentation without lists. The possibilities are endless.
TweetReach
Twitalyzer and other tools might do something similar to this, but I would love to see how many people an individual tweet (or just my account) reaches. I know, with bit.ly tools, I can track the number of users who clicked through a specific link, but if I am retweeting a popular story, I don’t know how many originated through me, or how many actually viewed or were served the link. I’d love to take an individual tweet and measure how many people saw it in their tweetstream. So, take my 430 followers, add it to the number of people who searched for something containing that term, and add it to the number of people retweeting it.
Right now, I can easily measure clicks and number of retweets, but this would give me greater insight to how much reach I got with each individual tweet, and from there I could then do more advanced measurements. A TweetReach metric would allow me to treat each microblog post like I would a full blogpost or a e-mail newsletter, allowing me to optimize language easier, do A/B testing and more. Sure, there are currently rudimentary ways I can measure my tweets, but while I’m creating wishes for Twitter Santa, this definitely goes on my short list.
So of these desired metrics, which are actually feasible and which are just pipedreams? I believe that each and every one of them would be relatively easy to build in. The TweetReach and ListTotal metrics I suggested could be built fairly easily by a competent third party development team, and could be used in conjunction with other Twitter analysis tools. However, Twitter has showed time and time again that it is painfully slow at developing new features. It took over 2 years to build in a Retweeting feature (that, so far, has received a lukewarm reception at best). Hopefully 2010 will be a new year, and will continue the progress that Twitter has made these past few months with the releases of Twitter Lists and Retweets. Only time will tell.
Jaremy writes a blog on gaming, technology, social media and marketing. He’d be thrilled if you got him any of these Twitter metrics for Christmas, but he also might be willing to settle for a Nikon D90.
Photo taken from jovike’s photostream.
Sounds like a pretty good list, albeit unlikely. All of those would be at the top of my list too. Shouldn’t Viralogy be building those into their vScore? Haha
By the way, I just got a new D3000 and I’m loving it.
I’m jealous. I’m looking into the D90, but the D3000 looks awesome.
We’re looking into new analytics/items to build into our vScore all the time, but there’s currently a long queue of features and only so many developers.
Hi Jaremy,
Let me start by stating that if my wife got me a great DLSR camera for Hanukkah, I would be pretty happy.
First lets get the obvious out of the way. The amount of data and control you have over your site or blog will always be drastically bigger than any third party applications, be it Twitter, Facebook or the next big thing. Also, you can’t really compared data from Facebook to Twitter. Facebook controls their ecosystem much, much closer than Twitter - which is why there are not over 50,000 applications based on Facebook like there are using Twitter. Facebook also happens to ask users (or allow for) for more demographic information than Twitter.
OK, now my 2 cents on your metrics
Unique Users: This is interesting. What do you mean by “how many people are visiting our own accounts” When I see your tweets on Tweetie or Hootsuite, I may be explicitly viewing your tweet…or I may not and you just might happened to be in be in my stream at that moment but I did not see it or browsed by it. What is a pageview in Twitter?
ListTotal: As I mentioned in your post about this matter, while I think the Lists have some great use for users, they are still very much a wild card in terms of terms of engagement and importance. I think you are taking some assumptions that based on your 25 lists (26 as of 10 minutes ago) you are on, that you have 302 followers. How many of are actually following you? Of those 25 lists, how many people are on more than one list?
FollowerOrigin: Capturing Referral Channel would be a great one. The tough part would be associating the correct point of conversion. For example, I actually found @jaremy from this website which took my to your profile on twitter.com. However, I did not follow until a few hours later using Tweetie on my iPhone. Who gets the attribution?
Demographics: Yup, but Twitter does not require much in terms of user information. Even location from your bio is too free-form. Go here http://www.twitalyzer.com/twitalyzer/list.asp?uri=list.asp and start to type in Seattle and see how many variations come up. Geo-location is good for real-time targeting, but not demographics. Until Twitter makes drastic changes to it’s user profiles, this will be on your wish list for quite some time.
TweetReach: This would be cool. Links are easy to track, views are not. Again, depending how I am viewing my stream, I may have been served up an “impression” of your tweet, but there is a good chance that I did not read it (not yours of course, those I read
“I believe that each and every one of them would be relatively easy to build in” OK. If you can put together the computations needed for these metrics, I will see if I can help you.
Always appreciate the thoughtful responses, Jeff.
Yes, there’s no way that we’ll ever be able to get nearly the control over our third party application pages as we would over our own blogs or websites, which is why some of my wishes are frankly destined to be nothing more than pipe dreams. However, I think it’s important to note that Facebook, a website that does control their ecosystem very closely, does provide somewhat robust tracking tools for its Fan Pages. It’s one of the reasons that I’m disheartened by the amount of tracking that Twitter provides.
Twitter is sort of like the baseball of social networks - everyone wants to analyze (and overanalyze) the existing numbers to see what it all really means. As such, it would greatly benefit those statistically-minded (read: obsessed) folks to have some more data points to use. The recent boom in baseball analysis has come from creating new, meaningful metrics (BABIP, wOBA, OPS+) around the current and old measurements (AVG, RBIs) Whether it happens or not, we’ll just have to wait and see. My goal in this post was to ask for a couple things that we don’t currently get (UUs, demographics, origin) along with some that we could ascertain (ListTotal, TweetReach). Some of this would be fantastic for personal use and analysis, especially for corporate brands, and others would be good for defining influence.
Unique Users: I was defining a “visit” or “pageview” as when a user visits your homepage (i.e. twitter.com/jaremy). It doesn’t account for the majority of the content I put out, which is read through feeds, but would give me an idea about how many people are actually interested enough to visit my page after reading a tweet or seeing my profile somewhere else. From there, I could later figure out what percentage of people (ballpark) are actually adding me based on following me. It might help me ascertain whether my biography or tweetstream is doing a good job of converting followers. This is different from TweetReach, which has to do with individual tweets.
ListTotal: I count anyone following the list that I’m on as “my follower”. I think the reason to do that is to track the total number of people tracking you on lists. Yes, there might be some overlap, but I’m skeptical as to how much there would really be. I can’t imagine that there is much more than a 5-10% difference in the total number of people following me on those lists and the total number of “followers”. Don’t quote me on that though :). But if we’re talking about someone on 300 lists, followed by 3,000 people, I’d imagine that there’s even less overlap. It would probably be worthwhile to do a case-by-case study of those numbers, but my guess is that unless someone is on relatively few lists and has relatively few followers, the amount of overlap is minimal. Therefore, I believe it’d certainly be a useful metric to track, at least when comparing apples to apples (i.e. not comparing someone featured on 25 lists with someone featured on 250). Using the tags, you could even just compare similar people (actors vs. actors, tech people vs tech people, bloggers vs bloggers).
FollowerOrigin: Yes, I think this would be very useful. But I agree, there’s absolutely an attribution issue. I don’t think you’d be able to come up with totally accurate answers for where ALL of your followers came from, but the same is true about online advertising (we measure clickthroughs and conversions, but oftentimes a conversion comes much later than the initial clickthrough, or without a clickthrough occurring at all). I don’t think the attribution issue makes the measurement any less worthwhile.
Demographics: This was one I thought that was the least likely. Facebook has a step up, because of the information tracked on profiles. Less than ideally, this tracking could be done with a service like comScore or Hitwise, but I’m always skeptical about their demographic information anyway. This would really rely on Twitter either a) changing the information they pull from profiles, or b) integrating some other service. Would be undoubtedly useful, but is nevertheless unlikely.
TweetReach: Best way to fudge this would be to take the total number of followers that each link could have been served to. So my 448 followers, plus the 1112 followers if you retweeted my post, etc. It’s honestly something that the new Twitter Retweet function might actually be good for. This is likely something that Twitter would need to eventually integrate, but I can’t imagine why they would not be able to put it together (# of Followers Tweeted + Person1-RT(# of followers) + Person2-RT(# of followers)… - OverlapFollowers). For a third-party team (read: Twitalyzer) to do this, they might have to fudge it more, to create an aggregate using a user’s most recent RT mentions to determine overall reach. Something similar to how Twitalyzer calculates influence, based on the number of followers for each account retweeting one of your posts publicly. This method wouldn’t allow you to measure an individual Tweet (which is what I’d ideally want), but would at least give you an idea on a day-by-day or week-by-week basis as to whether your Tweets are reaching more or less people.
The ideal, however, would be for TweetReach to show every single tweet that a user “saw”, or was “served” through a feed/stream. Again, there would be issues with this, as someone might be “served” 1000 tweets but really only read 50 of them, but it would at least (hopefully) not count inactive accounts or those who haven’t read their stream all day. A great ancillary feature of this would be to see which days/times are the best for Tweeting to your own list of followers, based on when your highest TweetReach is.
Hope that helps to clarify. I try to write my posts in a little broader strokes, but I am always happy to delve into greater detail :). Again, thanks for the responses, Jeff.