Insights using Twitter Analytics - Follower Profile Word Clouds

Posted by: Tim Reha | Tuesday, July 28, 2009 | 0 Comments | | Share

The key to Twitter is understanding how to leverage analytics to understand your audience, their conversations and sentiment. There are a number of data points that are measurable on Twitter. I will dedicate time to cover each of the below areas in different blog posts and add new measurable metrics in the future.

-Followers
-Unfollowers
-Updates
-Page Views
-Inbound Links
-Bounce Rate
-GeoTargeting
-Click Tracking
-Re-Tweet Tracking
-Search Traffic
-Trend Analysis
-Name / Brand Mentions

Followers

There are a number of metrics and strategies to leverage for Twitter followers. Here is a short list of metrics.

-Amount of Followers
-Quality of Follower Targeting (Are they really in your target audience)
-Follower Uptake Rate Graph
-Follower Drop Off Rate Graph

A good strategy for an event like the Seattle Wine Awards is to add a lot of new followers because these folks will often look at their new followers and take a look at their profiles. I created a custom branded Twitter background with Ticket Sales information and added a link to the Twitter Profile back to the Seattle Wine Awards website.. Thus, this was a very direct way to basically invite hundreds of people to the Seattle Wine Awards using Twitter, since the Seattle Wine Awards Twitter background featured event information. Social media savvy wine drinkers are very valuable because they Tweeted about our event to their friends and also Tweet about wine, a great benefit for our award winning wine makers.

I made a big push to post a lot of Twitter updates the week before the event. This increased the http://www.seattlewineawards.com website traffic by 465% on Saturday, June 13, one day before the event creating the largest ticket sales day.

Here is a graph showing followers that were added over time to the Seattle Wine Awards Twitter account http://twittercounter.com/wineawards/all/followers/ .

In addition, I spent a lot of energy adding friends who then converted to followers. My strategy was to first look at other winery and wine related Twitter sites. Then looked at their followers and added them as new friends, being careful to hand pick only people interested in wine as sometimes there will be followers that are actually network marketers or spammers. Next, I performed Twitter searches for “Washington Wine” using the quotes to only pull up Twitter users who used both “Washington” and “Wine” in a Twitter post. This provided a very targeted list of people who I then followed on Twitter.

Twitter Profile Word Clouds

I built up the Seattle Wine Awards Twitter account from 0 to 823+ Members in two months. Tweet Sheep is a word cloud generator from the bios of @wineawards’ followers. This tool clearly shows that the Twitter users following the Seattle Wine Awards are very much interested in wine.  http://twittersheep.com/results.php?u=wineawards

If you look carefully at the word cloud, you will glean other valuable information about the Seattle Wine Awards followers by looking at the words in the cloud. Here is the list and associated inferences for possible new business opportunities.

Travel - Opportunity to offer wine travel services. The word cloud lists regions such as Napa, Oregon, Walla Walla, thus offering wine travel to these areas are of interest to our followers.

Friends - Wine is a social experience enjoyed by friends. Wording in sales materials should include “bring your friends” or Buy three tickets get the fourth for free for your friend’s or a date”.

Art - Wine and art events. Wine themed art items.

Beer - Beer events.

Music - Wine and Music events. Music CDs as an up sell revenue source for wine sales.

Experience - People value experiences. Thus, it is smart to package wine related goods and services as “experiences” versus just a bottle of wine or wine event.

The above is a very basic example using basic tools to quickly analyze your Twitter audience. There are far more sophisticated “enterprise” level tools on the market, but often free tools will do the job that you need to communicate to your internal teams the value of social media. In the next social media “Twitter” blog post we will look at other ways to leverage Twitter with the use of Analytics to gain valuable insights and plans of action. Contact me if you have ideas for topics or use cases to cover.