As a convert of some time to Twitter, I support it wholeheartedly and revel in the little bits of info that keep getting leaked out, like I now know how to find my Twitter ID Number and it is 15010218 thanks to Mat Morrison. But seriously, since I first started using Twitter I have been conscious of what type of Tweets I use. Am I a knowledge sharer or a knowledge grabber, for example? After much analysis, I have worked out that I am a knowledge sharer but mostly of my own thoughts. I have never been big into RT. However, as we are working with corporates helping them get value out Twitter this got me thinking. Retweet is basically a viral pass along for free. Is it possible to demonstrate good ROI from a viral Twitter campaign? If so what would the metrics be?
In short the answer is a big whopping yes! I settled upon two basic metrics 1/. Reach (obvious I know) but 2/. Virality ( A new word and unit; Virality = Reach/time (in hrs).
I ran a Yahoo Pipe on the new Starbucks VIA Twitter campaign and found an original tweet had been retweeted 104 times in the last 24 hours. The total reach of those 104 tweets was 60,220!. To be clear this excludes new tweets and #VIA. That is a virality of 1003 people per hour. Not bad for free.
So come on marketing departments get onto Twitter, it has a potentially great reach but more impressively is the speed or Virality (remember you heard that word here first unless you’ve heard it somewhere else already) with which you can get a message out there.
