Social Media Analysis and Customer Relationships

Data is great. Visualization is better. Meaningful activity is the goal. Technology trying to help. Web: Consected Social | Twitter: @consected | Google+ Consected | RSS Keep up to date on our posts: signup for our email newsletter

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How to use LinkedIn to streamline your gated-content landing pages

LinkedIn, the site trusted by 180 million monthly visitors with their professional details can provide social media marketers with a huge opportunity to get to know their audience better. Since the site is concerned about privacy and is focused on peer-to-peer relationships (very few real people with 10000 'friends' on here), an anonymous request to connect is likely to be ignored. So how can marketers make use of this resource?

As I've been discussing for a while, Landing Pages provide a great way to get some information about your most engaged audience, in exchange for a giveaway of some kind - a free piece of content is a common one. An appropriately kitted-out landing page allows a visitor to login with LinkedIn to authorize access to his or her public profile quickly and easily, and open the gate to download content in return for the favor.

It should be noted that this gets the landing page owner access to the user's public profile, the same information that could be found by browsing around LinkedIn. Nothing extra is being shared, which takes the pressure off the visitor to share more than he wishes to. Although software developers can set up authorizations to ask for more information, experience shows that far more visitors will abandon the process, concerned with what you are planning to do with their data.

So, how does it look in practice? Pretty simple actually. After persuading a visitor about the value of the content you have on offer, a simple registration message and button is shown.

Reinforcing your privacy policy and how you intend to use the visitor's information is essential. Be open about what you are doing and limit your usage of personal information to help visitors feel comfortable sharing.

When the user clicks the Register button a new page pops up showing the standard LinkedIn authorization. As you can see, the number of pieces of information requested is limited (for the developers, this is set as the 'scope' of the request). This makes the request less threatening and therefore less likely to be abandoned.

Assuming the visitor authorizes this, the next step can be to either collect some additional information and verify the information pulled from LinkedIn, or to just skip this step and jump to the download. If you are verifying the information pulled from the LinkedIn profile, a form like this could be displayed:

Additional fields could be displayed here, unpopulated if other info is needed. But hopefully what I've shown is enough, otherwise you risk losing visitors at this point.

Hopefully, the visitor will click next and will get to the final page: to download the promised content.

The value to the visitor, especially when skipping step 3 with the additional form, is that the whole process is fast and streamlined. Especially for users working on mobile devices, limiting typing is a good thing.

The value for the marketing owner is not just the capture of the obvious information shown in the previous example form. In addition the URL to the visitors profile is also captured and linked to an email address and the main profile text. This makes it faster to review which visitors may be worth closer follow up and additional engagement, especially if the same email address had been used for activities such as email newsletter signups in the past. Multiple requests for your content from the same visitor shows an interest in what you are saying, and in some circumstances may represent a buying signal.

As with any information a visitor chooses to share on a website, there must be a level of trust that the data won't be abused or sold or used to start emailing unwanted junk. Landing pages and gated content only work when the deal appears to be stacked in favor of the visitor, especially with really unmissable content or e-books. This is certainly true when using LinkedIn, which users see as a reflection of their professional lives, and therefore hugely important to protect from abuse.

Although you may find that fewer visitors are willing to share LinkedIn authorizations, by gaining a limited set of visitors in this way can indicate that your brand is targeting those visitors incredibly successfully.

Consected SACRMento Landing Pages make it easy to capture visitors' information through LinkedIn and Twitter logins. Learn about how SACRMento can help you run your next gated-content campaign.

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Landing Pages - deceptively simple, and that's deceiving

And you thought that customers just searched for your company on Google and bought your products? Okay, I know you're not crazy, but do you know how online lead generation actually works well? You know, not just a Google Adword ad pointing at your company's home page, because that's just a lame and ineffective misuse of advertising cash. How do you generate leads with online advertising or SEO campaigns?

Any company that promotes its wares on the Internet needs to make contact with potential customers to generate leads. Landing Pages allow you to quickly and easily setup a branded page where visitors can add their contact information and make that contact. But why would they do that?

Well, in the world of content marketing, sharing valuable or desirable information, such as an e-book or white paper is usually enough to persuade visitors to part with their email addresses. By gating content you have opened a line of communication with a person who otherwise would probably just return to their busy lives and forget all about your business. You can follow up with an email marketing newsletter to keep your products firmly embedded in their brains.

Setting up a landing page to collect information this appears deceptively simple, and this appearance is definitely deceiving you. Effective landing pages have to:

look good and not cheap or amateurish

include great marketing copy to convince visitors on what you are offering

be mobile optimized (are you reading this on your phone?)

securely and reliably capture contact details as these are people who don't yet know whether to trust you

provide tons of useful analysis information so you can see what works

be easily updated as you learn what works and what doesn't

provide the ability to compare the results of split traffic (A/B testing) through two similar but different pages

actually deliver the e-book or other content that the visitor is requesting

Great, so you'd best get writing your copy, hitting the stock photo sites, understanding your target customers' persona, segmenting your audience, writing some ads, and persuading your corporate IT, or the local freelance web developer to start putting together a landing page.

"Are you sure it's secure?", may be the question off you lips to the developer. "Ah, hmm, well we email each request to your email address and forget it afterwards", might be the response. "Oh, and it will cost more to use that secure SSL https URL you've been taught to look for".

There is a much easier and better way though. There are Landing Page design tools out on the web that allow you some control, some drag and drop WYSIWYG editors to build your pages. There are too many to choose from sometimes, and many of them are scarily priced (check out the pricing page before committing to the 'free trial', as I'm sure many of us aren't ready for a $300 per month commitment initially). Do you have the time to invest in finding the "right one"? Or is it just easier to go back to the geeky developer dude?

The answer will depend very much on your own situation. Do you want to run just one campaign or many simultaneously? Do you want to capture leads from users coming from search, Adwords, Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook? Do you want to be tied into the marketing automation tools the landing pages vendor provides or do you already have an email marketing product and spreadsheet CRM you are happy with? 

Consider all these points to help you select the landing page solution you want, then get writing. Once you have the technology in place it is exclusively the quality of your marketing copy and the careful selection of long-tail advertising keywords that will make your online lead generation campaign a cost-effective success!

Interesting in trying some landing pages for your company to help with lead-gen? Take a look at SACRMento Landing Pages, which will setup pages automatically using your Twitter login, saving you time and effort, and allowing you to focus on the compelling copy that will sell what you are offering.

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Gated Content and Content Sharing on the social media battleground

There are two seriously opposing camps facing-off in the battle for marketing success: the gated-content ‘Traditionalists’ versus the sharable-content ‘Socialites’.

In short, should you make sure that people who are interested enough to read your valuable content subscribe in some way so that you can keep them engaged in the future (or treat them as a 'lead' in the sales funnel). Or is content a more powerful marketing tool when it is just freely shareable? These are powerful approaches and many marketers advocate for one side or the other.

This is my first post over on Medium. Please have a read, provide feedback, and of course share with all your friends. I look forward to writing a future post on this concept here on Meaningful Social, based on the feedback and smart ideas that will come flooding to me now that I've hit "Publish".

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It is what you tweet and who you tweet with that counts

Yesterday I wrote a short post "Should I tweet now? What time of day gets your brand the most retweets and mentions?". The outcome of that quick analysis was that you need to aim to get your important tweets out into the wild for the 9am rush (in the timezone where the majority of your audience is located). People read and retweet over a coffee or tea in the morning it seems. So today, I wanted to expand the research a little. How does all that social media engagement align with the actual volume of tweets you post?

This is more of less the same chart as yesterday, but with the actual volume of tweets made by the brand overlaid in green. So despite the highest level of retweets and mentions happening at 9am, the brand is tweeting more after this timeframe. This keeps the flow of engagement through the day a little higher I'm sure. Really though, it is a reflection of real social engagement at work.

Based on the fact that a brand can't just broadcast messages all day long, and needs to engage with its audience, the spike at 10am, after our 9am rush of retweets and mentions shows that this brand is truly engaging with their audience based on their very recent engagement: "Thanks for retweeting", "Pleased you enjoyed that blog post", "Still have questions? Let me know how I can help.". These all figure in here and are the truly essential part of the overall social media equation.

How can we be sure of this? Well, take a look a the hourly volume of the brand's tweets that are a reply to a previous tweet.

This runs from 8am through to 10pm. The spikes are at 10am and 1pm. We are seeing great response to mentions and questions throughout the working day, but the real spikes in activity are corresponding to the highest engagement the brand's audience shows. This must set a good tone with customers and potential customers alike.

What's the takeaway?

I started the title of this post as "If I tweet now, who cares about what I write?". This was just plain misleading. As we see from the analysis of a successful brand with world-class social media, thinking about what the brand is doing all the time is only one side of the equation. It is essential to engage with your audience as they engage with you, to reply to questions, respond to mentions and thanks your contacts for sharing. This in turn drives more engagement with the tweets you have already made, rather than just turning the handle and churning out cookie-cutter tweets all day long.

Understand your audience, talk to them like the human-beings that they are. And provide great content for them to engage with a couple of times a day. Then it seems you'll be considered a much more appealing social brand.

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Should I tweet now? What time of day gets your brand the most retweets and mentions?

Just a quick post of some recent analysis today. Have you ever asked yourself whether you are wasting your best efforts by tweeting big news and blog posts at the wrong time of day? If you haven't asked yourself, you should, and if you have asked but had no easy way of answering, allow me to enlighten you on the results looking at an East Coast customer of SACRMento, the Consected social analysis tool.

A picture is worth a thousand words, so here it is:

Number of retweets and mentions on average for a major East Coast Twitter account

(Note that for the mentions, the time of the original tweet may actually fall into an earlier hourly bucket. The retweets though are recorded against the time of the original tweet.)

The takeaway?

This is an easy one for this account (you should perform your own analysis to see if this fits for you too): tweets earlier in the day seem to be picked up by users having their morning coffee. There is a brief spike again around lunch time, then things trail off fast.

Targeting major tweets and breaking news in the morning obviously makes sense since it gives the whole day to allow it to filter around your audience. Even with that said, it can be seen that tweets posted in the morning gain the highest number of retweets.

Although reading tools such as Flipboard are giving some tweets a longer lifespan than the typical few seconds they appear in many timelines, getting your major tweets lined up for the morning makes a lot of sense.

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Tweet a link, get a robot, spot a common landing page mistake.

When you add a link to your website to a tweet then check your web analytics you'll be excited to see the rush of traffic you suddenly get. All those people checking out your stuff. Hey, let's try that again...

If you are promoting a product or testing out a new content marketing campaign, you quickly become disappointed that so few of those apparent 'clicks' convert to a download, a share, an inquiry or some other post-social action. You start to ask yourself questions like "is there something wrong with the page content?", or, "is the website misbehaving?". What's up? Why is all this initial interest evaporating into an invisible nothingness? And what can I do about it?

We do the leg work to find out what and why...

A couple of days ago we ran an experiment to see what the deal is. We tweeted a self-promotional tweet [view the original tweet here] with a link to get a free landing page, guessing that due to the timing and content we were unlikely to get much interest from our regular followers.

We shortened the link with Bitly so we could get their count of clicks. On the end of the expanded link a genuine offer really existed, with a small addition to grab the browser "user-agent" string that most browsers send when they visit your page. The "user-agent" string is anonymous and just shows some technical combination of meaningless characters from which you can guess the operating system, the browser, the version and so on. It is by no means foolproof, let alone accurate. But it does give some clues, and allowed us a quick way to count the page hits. 

With all that in place, we now had a count of what Bitly counts as clicks and what our web server counted as hits. The hits are shown on an hourly basis in the following chart.

Wow! We're amazing, right? Wrong.

In fact, or the 106 hits that are shown here, Bitly only registered 3 as real clicks. You read that right, THREE. Which means that 103 were other random hits on our landing page that were really messing with the analysis.

What were these rogue hits? Well, here's the browser user-agent strings we received:

If your screen is large, or you have great eyesight (or probably both), you'll see what a jumble of information the browser user-agent gives. In some, like the first we see

RebelMouse/0.1 Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; http://rebelmouse.com) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/7.0.1

What does all this mean? Well, more or less it is telling us clearly that rebelmouse.com is the provider of the technology hitting the page (14 times in this case). And that to 'help' the page present nicely (not mangle itself so RebelMouse can't read it), it also pretends to be a version of Mozilla Firefox running the Gecko layout engine (the part of the browser that draws all your nice page in a recognizable way). Whatever the naming, RebelMouse is basically an aggregator and reads pages with a robot for presentation on your own website. These are not human clicks. 

Then there are more tech 'browsers' hitting the page. Java/1.6.0_35 is the second, and I know for sure that there aren't any commercial browsers that present themselves under the name of just a version of a programming language (the marketers would have intervened first!). So we can rule out a quarter of our hits in the top two lines.

Now, the next two are interesting:

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.4; en-US; rv:1.9.2.2) Gecko/20100316 Firefox/3.6.2

Mozilla/14.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows NT 7.2; .NET CLR 4.0.3705;)

These look like regular human browsers but Bitly didn't register them. Extra digging was required to find out why (and I won't bore you with that). But by now we've ruled out 40 of our 106 so-called clicks. To robots.

So we've wasted all that effort on a bunch of dull tech that can't even do anything with our page? Keep reading, the fun part is still to come...

This got confusing - let's back up a bit

And so we can dig in further, but what you'll see without forensic work is that in just this quick test we also received visits from these robots:

PaperLiBot

Butterfly

FlipboardProxy

TweetedTimes

MetaURI

Kimengi

spider

rogerbot

Twitterbot

ShowyouBot

YandexBot

TweetmemeBot

Embedly

Diffbot

(something using) PhantomJS

getprismatic.com

Crowsnest.tv

That's a whole lot of robots. And a whole lot of non-clicks.

Why do these robots 'click' links? Why not just read the tweets?

Partly the robots want to see the content of a tweet, so they can present a summary of the linked page nicely to users. Does that mean that users are actually consuming some of your content, so the robot 'click' could be considered valid?

The answer here is probably no. A human reader of this robot mangled data is is probably just seeing a brief link preview, a short description and no more (just like what you see when a page is shared on Facebook). That is enough for a human to decide if they do or they don't want to read your stuff.

What is the takeaway?

You can get super-excited by your web analytics, or you can look carefully at what is going on. The real reason for a landing page is to try and elicit a response from a user. Only through some form of human interaction can you really tell if your campaign is working, but equally it is hard to know if your landing page is just scaring people away when you see so many abandoned visits. Take care in how you read your web visits. 

The big deal though is to pay attention to the meta tags at the top of the page HTML. Or for UI-developed web pages, when you are asked for a description of the page, spend more than a few seconds writing it. Robots extract this information to show in link previews. These few words may be all many of your audience (reading through an aggregator, or a Facebook or LinkedIn share) ever see of your page. A poorly thought out description could completely put people off ever clicking the page, even if the tweet sounded great.

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Want more followers? Can you reach?

You want to grow your number of Twitter followers. Having a larger audience gives you a better chance of getting your message out there, having your brand noticed, making your next social lead-gen campaign work. Knowing the background of what grows your followers can help you formulate a strategy for making it actually happen.

To help along the way I looked at What Matters Most? Retweets or Clicks very recently. In that research we identified that retweets seem to matter more than the number of clicks on your content links when trying to grow your followers (despite the fact that 'clicks' indicate more users are consuming your real content and message). But the count of retweets isn't everything. What about the 'reach' of your tweets that are retweeted?

In other words, does the number of followers each of the retweeters have make a difference to the rate you grow your own followers?

The pink line in the chart above shows the growth in followers for a large Consected Social Analysis beta user. The stacked red / blue bars show the number of mentions and the number of retweets on a daily basis (the total stack height indicating the total number of interactions). The green bar represents the "retweet reach", the total followers for every user who retweeted your tweets on a daily basis (it is on a logarithmic scale, so larger numbers don't swamp everything else). Put another way, the green bar represents the number of potential pairs of eyes that could see your tweets because of a retweet.

What does it show? In most cases, the steepest rise of the followers line appears around or directly after the stacked red/blue interactions bar is highest. When the interactions are lower, the followers line levels off significantly. The green 'retweet reach' bars just don't seem to drive the upward acceleration of the followers line. There may be some influence, but it is not as pronounced as you would expect from suddenly getting your tweet in front of a million sets of eyeballs watching one or two big users.

So, the value of retweets alone could be questioned. What about the reach from @mentions (which includes the use of "RT" characters rather than the retweet function)? Can we see a link to the growth in followers from all this extra audience?

In this new chart, everything remains the same (pink line = followers; red/blue stack = daily retweet count + mentions count), except the gold bars. This new bar represents the total reach on a daily basis for tweets. This means all your own followers, plus all the followers of users who retweeted your tweets, plus all the followers of users who mentioned your message.

In this chart the gold bars seem to follow the total number of interactions more closely (probably due to the fact that we now include the effect of the mentions on the numbers), but it does deviate. It is these deviations that really matter though. When the total reach is high but the total interactions count is lower there is not the expected big rise in the number of followers. Especially since the gold bars are effectively squashed down for really large numbers due to the logarithmic scale, you might expect the influence of the higher reach to be extremely pronounced. It just isn't.

What's the deal?

Everything we have seen points to the fact that the total number of interactions with your tweets from your own followers is what matters most:

your audience's friends are more likely to see your tweets, and that first-level interaction appears to be important to would-be followers

the potential audience that comes from users with enormous followings (giving a high reach for tweets) is probably diluted since those users rarely engage on-on-one with individuals, so their retweets are seen more as broadcasts and just ignored 

if your direct audience is sharing, they are also paying attention, which may not increase your number of followers but is essential for true engagement and a strong community

It is easy to wish for Twitter users with an enormous following to retweet your tweets so you can gain followers. But if you chase that exclusively it seems that your effort is going to be wasted, since the effect is negligible. Having a greater number of your own, direct followers retweet and mention your tweets seems to attract more new followers. The standard rules of social media are upheld: engage your followers personally and they will reward you.

Get these insights for your own Twitter data. Join the Consected Social Analysis beta.

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Just one more tweet...

Social media can be an effort. Even for brands with decent-sized marcom teams, justifying a little more time on Twitter and a little less time talking to the media (for example) can be a challenge. As with anything, understanding your objectives and being able to use a metric or KPI to show that your effort is worthwhile is key to guiding your day-to-day activities. If one of your goals it to interact directly with potential customers more often, to engage with them and understand their concerns, answer their questions and provide them valuable information, then social engagement is essential. But still, is that one more tweet worth the effort?

I could possibly just stop writing at this point. This chart is real data from a Consected Social user. The mint green daily volumes of tweets by the brand can easily be seen to drive total interactions with its audience. Better still, in this example the goal of engaging with customers appears to really be on target, with the number of mentions (red, top bar) outweighing retweets (blue, bottom bar). People are mentioning the brand and opening up to conversation.

How many other marketing activities give you so much direct contact with your audience? So go on, have just one more...

Follow @consected on Twitter or get on the list for the Consected Social beta.

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Retweets or Clicks? Which matters most when growing your followers?

We all know that the number of Twitter followers you have is not the only metric that you should use to drive your social media strategy. But if all else is equal (you're not buying followers or suddenly running crazy promotions), then a jump in followers could be considered a fair indicator of the success of a campaign. The question is whether you should be aiming for tweets that get retweeted more or tweets with links that get clicked more?

Now, assuming that you are putting out original content as part of a content marketing strategy, there is always a heap of value from clicked links. People have hopefully read and absorbed a little of your message and that may convert to real leads. But a higher number retweets typically means a higher reach (with more eyeballs on your brand), which has a implicit value too.

So back to assuming we want to grow our follower base exclusively, in order to have a better chance of our great content and brand being seen, what should we be aiming for?

The two charts show the same red line indicating the number of followers, over time. This is overlaid with the number of link clicks per day (blue columns) on the left and number of retweets per day on the right.

Looking at the left-hand chart (clicks) first, what strikes me is that early in the timeline the number of link clicks is fairly constant, or even declining a little, but still we see growth and plateaus in the follower count that don't seem to correspond to the clicks. In the second half of that left hand chart, growth in followers accelerates, plateauing towards the end as clicks tail off. So one half of the chart suggests a correlation, the other not so much. Assuming all these links are to our own content, the content is not converting to more followers.

Looking at the right-hand chart (retweets) now, the lower growth rate in followers for the first half of the timeline seems to correspond to a lower retweet rate. As retweets increase, so does the growth rate for followers. The plateau at the end is not entirely clear, but it also seems to fit initially.

So why, if we all consider that people want valuable content, does it seem to be that reading the content is not a driver to increasing the size of our potential audience? Do people read, and then forget to share? Do we make it too hard to share our content when it has been read, so new followers are not attracted?

On the other hand, people seem to love motivational quotes, a little philosophy in their day, or the chance to chime in on a "retweet if you agree" kind of question. These are easy to share and they get shared a lot. Potentially these are reaching a broader audience and leading to more people wanting to see more of what we have to say.

With these metrics alone, there is no clear winner in the "content or not debate", but the total retweets (for posts with or without links) seems to lead to to the highest gains in followers. Sharing is king, whatever it is your audience is sharing.

In the next post or two, I'm going to dig a bit deeper in to the analytics, to filter based on the content of the tweets. Make sure you follow on Tumblr, share using an icon below, or follow @consected on Twitter so you don't miss out.

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Our right to privacy is in question. The question is, do we care?

Running an analysis of all the Twitter users appearing in the @consected home timeline over the last couple of months it would seem that a significant minority of tweeters don't care whether the rest of the world, let alone the NSA, know where they are when they are tweeting (pie #1). Since people are tweeting a huge amount from their GPS-enabled phones, it would seem they could be giving away a significant amount of information about themselves and their activities.

I wondered if this was just a reflection of @consected's tech-savvy set of Twitter friends. So I re-ran the research across a larger set of users using the Consected Twitter Analysis tool. And as you can see from pie #2, almost 40% of Twitter users were geo-enabled. Its not just my friends and followers then.

Fortunately, all is not lost. The actual number of tweets that appear to actually be geo-tagged is much smaller. In a sample of about 1.26 million tweets, about 16,800 were geo-tagged, equivalent to 1.3% of tweets having a geo-location provided. Hopefully this indicates that people are consciously tagging tweets with location when they feel it is appropriate to do so, not just doing it unthinkingly.

Do you geo-tag your posts? Do you think it is safe to do so? Or are you a geo-tagged, Foursquare, check-in and understand my habits anywhere kinda person?

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Do you need more followers for a better Klout Score?

Klout dubs itself as the "Standard for Influence", and a Klout Score is a simple number between 1 and 100 that ranks how influential a person or corporate profile is online. Its apparent simplicity makes Klout an appealing vanity indicator for how well your social activities are getting your message out to potential customers. The question is, does a higher Klout Score suggest that another user truly has a larger potential audience to increase the reach of your tweets? And how does this map against a user's actual Twitter follower count?

Researching the active friends and followers of @consected, you can see quickly in the charts that there seems to be little correlation between the number of followers a user has and his or her Klout score. The two pictures show the same set of friends and followers ordered by either Klout Score or Twitter followers. Neither show the pattern you'd expect. Why?

The most obvious answer is that the Klout Score is based on more than just Twitter. @constantcontact at the top of the first chart (sorted by Klout) is really active on all social channels and this is reflected in the high Klout. @craighcollins, top of the second (followers) chart appears to focus largely on Twitter (no recent updates appear on Facebook), and therefore the user's Klout is lower. Obviously, for serious Twitter marketers the influence and engagement that comes from this channel may account for the greatest slice of the Klout pie, but the slice of pie can never really reach the same size as those with a broader social strategy.

When looking at getting your content shared with the greatest reach, a user with a higher Klout might seem to be most appealing since they have greater influence across more channels. But if you are sharing your content on Twitter, bear in mind that most users will share (through retweets or mentions) purely on Twitter rather than copying links and messages to Facebook or LinkedIn as well (other evidence of this in a future post). The number of followers your active audience has is far more important to you if you primarily share your content on Twitter. Klout really does appear to be most useful as a vanity metric, and less so if you take the time to segment your audience.

Help boost @consected's vanity and finally raise my Klout over 50: follow @consected for more useful social analysis and curated content.

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Want to do that again? Maybe the past can help predict the future

Sometimes when you appear to have a breakthrough on Twitter and get a bunch of new followers in close succession you wonder to yourself what you did. "Wouldn't it be nice if I could do that more often", you think. As a marketer, making the things you do repeatable is essential if you are to be successful or at least maintain some work-life balance.

There are few tools out in the wild that make it easy to get a view of when things happened, then to give you a slice of activity around that time to allow you to see what was going on. Were you participating in a tweetchat, did you share an awesome piece of content before anybody else found it, did you tweet your own blog post and at was shared? You can guess, trawl through the brain cells and try and remember, or like most people you'll run out of time and have to move onto more urgent matters. The past's in the past, right? Gotta get on to putting out the next fire.

With a quick snapshot of time around important events (more followers, loads of mentions, a ton of retweets) you need to be able to quickly view the actual tweets themselves, plus get a snapshot of who was involved and what the hash tags were.

Common reasons that then become easy to spot:

sharing more tweets than you typically do

engaging with a new or popular person in a meaningful way

participating in a tweetchat (spot the hash tag?)

getting really lucky and writing a tweet that attracts a ton of retweets

something completely external, such as a call-to-action in a blog post to follow @consected!

The majority of these can be found with existing tools if you just take the time (but who has time?). The external events are harder to pinpoint though. Basically, you need to track clicks on any buttons or links that point to your Twitter account and correlate these with the spikes in followers you notice (in a reporting tool, or just the Twitter @mentions page). 

Sounds like a pain to do. If you try and tack all the moving parts together yourself, it unfortunately is. So we decided to make it easy. We've just added the technology to the Consected Twitter Analysis tool to count clicks from your website, blog or articles that take people to your Twitter page. And present them alongside your Twitter timeline so you know what's happening, when. Makes for an eye-catching report for 'management' too.

We think this is pretty cool, and we'd like to share it with you. Not yet signed up for a beta? Click here to sign up for the beta tool and we'll also share the little snippet of code for your website that counts the clicks to twitter.com/yourprofile and a link shortener that lets you track all kinds of events in your analytics stream.

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Favorite apps -- different users, new results

Yesterday I took a quick look at the Twitter clients used by friends and followers of @consected. Today I've changed the search criteria to focus on a large B2B beta user of the Consected Twitter Analysis tool. The data is from about 313000 tweets over a couple of weeks this month.

What's interesting is that only the top two Twitter clients are in the same position as the @consected results. HootSuite appears not to be used by so many friends and followers of this user (15.6% compared with 18.6%), with a far greater percentage using the web (14.7% compared with 10% for @consected) suggesting that the audience is less of a pro-marketer crowd. Still, I don't think HootSuite would be upset with this top-ranking result.

Interestingly in this sample TweetDeck is way down the rankings. If your audience didn't adopt Twitter clients early in their evolution, TweetDeck isn't something they are likely to use, especially since it is really now pretty much defunct and not promoted by Twitter. Overall though, approximately 35% of tweets originate from clients owned by Twitter (including the Tweet Button). Buffer, a client for sharing tweets and articles through the day ranks far less highly with this crowd. So much for time starved business marketers making use of technology to make their lives easier!

Based on this potential audience for tweets, what are the take-aways? A ton of people are following timelines intermittently with a real-time app from Twitter across a range of devices. These people you have to catch in the moment, especially those on mobile devices.

Then there is a fairly large percentage (maybe a quarter) automating their tweeting with HootSuite or Buffer and similar apps, or feeding their blog direct to tweets with a tool like twitterfeed. Not ideal readers of your updates then.

The potential reach for your tweets may be high if you've got a lot of followers. Your actual active audience for an individual tweet is much, much smaller. Automation may catch some additional attention, sharing the same thing multiple times for example. But the gold still goes to those who can get their tweets retweeted multiple times, effectively multiplying the number of eyeballs on your message and name. Great content gets shared and as ever creating or curating great content should be the goal.

Interested in these results and want to try the Twitter Analysis tool for yourself? Join our beta. Visit: consected.com/social

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What's your favorite app?

For a B2B account it seems that HootSuite is the winner, with 18.6% of tweets originating from that source.

You might be surprised to hear that the second most popular Twitter app for sending tweets is... the web. Covering the Twitter website alone  plus separately the Tweet button appearing on many websites, 13.6% of all tweets come directly through the web. Add to this Twitter's own apps (for iPhone, Android, iPad, Mac and Tweetdeck) and you gain an additional 16.7% of tweets. So overall, about 31% of tweets originate from a source owned by Twitter.

This probably bodes well for Twitter's advertising plans. The question from marketers is, "who cares?".

If you look at the primary target user for HootSuite, it is predominantly professional, social media savvy, marketing users. So a large amount of tweeting and sharing is done between like-minded people who need a power tool to support their social media efforts. Then it is the web, and that unsurprising captures a full range of users, especially since the Twitter website has become pretty, full-featured, and more responsive than many apps. It is also extremely 'real-time', meaning that few of an audience will catch a tweet unless they are really looking at their timeline in that moment. A marketer's strategy must take into account that most users will not see their tweets the first time through.

This insight was based on over 51,000 tweets in the @consected timeline, which has primarily B2B tech followers and friends. Next, I'll take a look at a comparison across a broader set of user timelines.

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What time is it there?

Do you know where your Twitter followers are in the world? Most user don't enable geo-location / geo-tagging on their profile or posts, so getting a really accurate view for the masses is virtually impossible. But the reality is I don't need to know what street a person's office is on, or which pub they were sitting in when they last updated their profile.

Time zone is a pretty good way of getting a broad geographical location and appears to be set fairly accurately for many Twitter users. The first pie chart above shows the breakdown users appearing in the @consected timeline. It is definitely more useful than country alone: USA, Canada, Australia are broad areas, where people work and sleep at different times within the same country. Which ties back to my earlier post: have you ever wondered when your Twitter followers are most active?

With both the activity chart from the previous post and the timezone breakdown, not only can you get a good view of when your biggest audience is actually posting (and therefore probably sharing) tweets, you also get a good idea of whether they are at work or at home. Better yet, you probably get a clue if English, Spanish, French, German or Hindi is their first language (if you're a multilingual person or company, that may make a big difference to you).

Maybe it is worth checking into where your most retweets and mentions come from. Are you missing a broad geographical area for some reason? Again for @consected, the second pie chart shows a similar breakdown, though it seems my Tweets have more of a draw outside of the east and west coast of the US compared to my proportion of friends and followers located there. Could that indicate an area I need to work on?

Taking a look at who you are tweeting to and when becomes important as you try to get the best ROI from your social media marketing efforts. For some particularly successful tweets, perhaps it is possible to look at the breakdown of location for those tweets alone to see what time it is where that audience is.

Want to get this breakdown for your Twitter profile? Get an invitation to the Consected beta.

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Busy bee - better beta

This has been a fun-packed week for the Twitter Analysis and Social CRM beta. Lots of work has gone into the backend tweet indexing process, but nobody really cares about that (though you might do when you see all the analysis it will provide). What everybody is getting excited about is the new dashboard.

What hope is there for an analytics apps without a dashboard? None. And, based on feedback we were getting from beta users, we needed to do something to make the tool more accessible the moment you get started. The ability to dig into data is all very well, but with no background as to how to do it we were inviting failure (or a lot of hand-holding for those that could spare the time for that).

So, the dashboard. It looks cool, right? And it pulls out recent activities that you may need to respond to, directly in front of your face as soon as you log in. You'll see:

the number of mentions and retweets you've been getting in the sidebar

your most retweeted tweets

a bar chart of keywords that have been leading to the most mentions and retweets

activity with any people you've tagged as contacts

a pie chart showing the percentage of users interacting with you (your 'audience') coming from each time zone

the sidebar with contact search and Twitter trends

A nice overview to get started. Better yet, when you click on a button below a widget, it will take you directly into the full analytics screen showing the filter parameters for that widget. So you get to see how the widget data was actually collected, and get a baseline for refining your analysis. In this way the dashboard provides and 'at a glance' view of your social world, as well as a mechanism to bookmark your analyses.

Did I say bookmark? Oh yes I did. Next week we hope to make the selection of widgets configurable for the group, and to allow users to add new widgets based on their own analytics filters. All so you can get the information that is most important to you on your dashboard.

Think you have a large enough Twitter audience that you might want to do some analysis? Want to grow that audience? Why not sign up for the Twitter Analysis and Social CRM beta. Click here for the invitation form.

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Friends, followers and lists - do they equal success for social media marketing?

All the "how to do Twitter for business" guides talk about keeping a good balance between the number of people you follow and the number of followers you have. At the low end (less than 1000) of the spectrum, this may well be true given that it seems people may be put off from following a new person if they appear to be a stalker or completely unlikely to follow you back. But for the more successful Twitter users you routinely see on the social network, is the same true? Do the people who preach these kind of rules live by them themselves? And does this have any relationship to the number of lists that the user appears on?

This morning I decided to take a look at the successful users I follow on the @consected account, to see if the rules stick. I purposefully filtered it to just the users who have interacted with @consected at some point in the last year or so, through a mention, a retweet or a direct message. In other words, I used an arbitrary way to select just the accounts I might consider a possible audience of mine that appear to be backed by real people, rather than just broadcast feeds for news media and Barack Obama.

The chart perhaps backs up what we would expect in the majority of cases. In order that the bars appear in each group (blue first, red second, gold third) for each user are:

blue: number of followers

red: number of friends (users followed)

gold: number of lists the user is listed in (scale adjusted for easier comparison)

With a few exceptions, we can see that that overall the bars for each user line up fairly closely. Especially the followers and friends, which are close in all but a few cases. 

At this top end of the popular Twitter users, we see that where there is a big difference between friends and followers, the number of followers exceeds the number of people followed. In these cases we are looking at brands, such as @ConstantContact that maintain an active community of customers, and would be expected to have more followers.

In terms of lists, there is a little variation, but it is worth considering what lists are about and remembering that you have little direct control of being listed. You make it to a list generally because others feel your tweets are worth watching more closely than the large mass of people they are following. The bigger gold spikes on the chart, where list count doesn't follow friends and followers appear to be related to users who are highly active social media users, who tweet a lot, and therefore have a lot of content that others would like to follow and share. In a few cases the users are listed out of proportion also appear to have virtually no users they follow. They are very private people who happen to be highly popular, or they are broadcasting.

OK, so enough stats. What does this mean for you? Well, we have no idea looking at this chart whether the people at the top end of it got to this final balance by keeping the balance of friends and followers throughout. Although, if we look further down the list, it would appear that the users that are climbing up through the ranks are tracking the same kind of friends:followers balance on their way. This would suggest that the balance between friends and followers works well in the mid-tier too.

As for lists, you have no direct control over this. You need good content to share regularly to get listed by somebody else, and your areas of interest have to be broadly applicable. An exclusively "butterfly watching enthusiast" is likely to get listed less than a social media maven. Funnily enough the latter gravitate towards using Twitter and get followed and listed by a larger number of like-minded people.

All that said, looking at lists and their relationships to other stats is a useful next step to understanding what can make business marketing more successful using Twitter.

Stay tuned for more research and and insights! Follow this Tumblr blog, click the RSS link at the top of the page, follow on Twitter, or take a look at the tool that helped produce this analysis.