And how can social media help drive your business? Technology editor, Jamie Riddell, has plenty of ideas.

Twitter continues to mature and with it adds more associated tools that can help us use it as a DM tool. 

The growth of Twitter has led to a rapidly-growing ‘industry’ of add-ons, plug-ins and other ‘stuff’ (technical term!) to boost your Twitter enjoyment. Looking at oneforty.com, the unofficial Twitter App store, there are hundreds of different tools available to improve your experience. 

From a DM point of view, and for this article, we are only interested in analytics.  

Extending our knowledge of how our tweets are being received, shared and responded to will help us grow this channel as a strong DM channel, comparable with other digital channels. 

While I will refer to Twitter throughout this article, please bear in mind this also applies to other social channels and media. Not just Twitter clones like identi.ca but also channels like Google Buzz, which has attracted a lot of interest and an equal share of privacy-related controversy. 

So, while some of the specifics only work for Twitter, there are a lot of ideas and learning we can extend across social media. 

The growth of associated analytics tools will help us understand more about how our tweets are received and acted upon. So, we can immediately stop worrying about how many followers we have, or indeed the ratio of followers to following. What becomes more important is how our tweets are received and how many clicks they have achieved. 

Yes, I know clicks aren’t a measure of campaign performance but they are the starting point for looking at this channel as a traffic/business generator. If we are looking at tweets to generate business, we need to be linking to something. If this was a PPC campaign or an email campaign, we would be tracking each link. There is no reason why we can’t do the same here.

We need to generate a trackable url using your preferred ad server or analytics tool and then putting it through a short url service like bit.ly or in time, goo.gl. If you aren’t using short urls you will have no doubt seen them as a useful method for reducing your tweet size, so you should join in. 

Adding the short urls will give you the click data, and combined with an analytics tool you can understand more about who is clicking on your links, when and, to a certain extent, why. In my experience, I achieve more clicks later in the afternoon (UK time) as more people stray onto Twitter in the UK as the US wakes up. 

So, if I was looking to maximise clicks, I would be starting in the afternoon. 

International party

But, Twitter being an international party, I shouldn’t be restricting my promotions. If done correctly, I could be pushing the same link a few times during the day . . . BUT not enough to annoy my followers. That would have a long-term negative impact. 

Using analytics can give me more facts on which to base my decisions as well as highlighting who my most influential followers are which will help with message dissemination. 

Now, we have a lot of data to play with. Followers, clicks, arrivals, sales – this is starting  to look like any other digital campaign in need of optimisation. And optimise we can! 

Tools like Radian 6, SocialToo and Tweetmeme all work to understand influencers (note: there are many others available) – who likes your tweets, who is retweeting your content and, most importantly, who is clicking on your links.

In time, this builds into a useful picture of your performance from which you can build further. 

Optimisation isn’t just restricted to who tweets or doesn’t tweet your links. As in any other digital campaign, there are other factors to optimise. 

In a recent survey of short url providers, Watchmouse identified that some short url providers were a lot slower than others, taking up to two seconds to redirect the link. This delay could be costing your campaign with dropped clicks. 

The survey identified that (not surprisingly) Google’s url Goo.gl was the fastest, with Tinyurl coming close behind. The fact that Goo.gl is not  freely available to us all yet is frustrating, but may point to further implementations to come. 

Using companies like Bit.ly, or Tweetmeme offer great benefits but also add more parties to the overall tracking canvas. 

We know that disparities will occur between different tracking providers, which only adds distortion to the picture. 

Ideally, we want all the tracking in one place, including the short url function. While smaller tracking companies like Clicky and HootSuite have created their own short url service, there is not one offered by major tracking providers. 

The Goo.gl url may be the first and most logical step to connecting the tracking together for greatest learning  so it would be nice to see that appearing in Google Analytics some time soon. 

New datasets

So, with more and more data being available for social media campaigns, we can start to bring it more and more into the overall marketing picture. 

But new datasets are not only coming for social marketing campaigns, nor am just going to talk about social media! 

Recently, Microsoft announced the launch of OData – a data ‘store’ and Project Dallas, offering data miners the chance to collect and manipulate ever more data.

Project Dallas is a new data innovation from Microsoft that will open up data analysis and sharing using their OData application and the Azure platform (that’s their cloud storage like AmazonAWS.) 

This is important as it opens up a lot of potential for data manipulation and data access to a wider audience. 

If we skip the actual implementation bit (it involves SDKs, Atoms and XMLs) and head onto the data store, I can explain why it is important. 

The data store allows companies like Pitney Bowes to offer data that can be harnessed by a wide audience to integrate with existing planning tools. 

So, data mapping and in-depth geographic analysis solutions (their words, not mine) are suddenly available ‘off the shelf’. If geographic data isn’t your thing, then what about weather forecasts constantly available and updated for use in your planning (ever tried weather-related search titles and descriptions)? 

Project Dallas could bring a new way in which we can access, share and monetise data, with not a shoulder pad in sight.

The fact that new data streams are coming from both very large and from small companies puts digital direct marketing in good shape for future growth. 

And, with Microsoft seemingly reinvigorated (did we mention the new Windows Phone 7 coming soon?) and  also planning a microblogging (Twitter) tool, we can look forward to a lot more data to play with. 

  Since 1996, Jamie Riddell has been at the forefront of UK digital direct marketing. He made his name as the far-sighted, entrepreneurial co-founder of Cheeze Ltd, now part of DMG PLC, the UK’s largest Digital Marketing Group. Now independent, Riddell comments on emerging trends of the digital market with a perspective on the business end of technology. Find him on Twitter: (http://twitter.com/jamieriddell) and on his own blog: (http://www.jamieriddell.net).