Of course, favorites and retweets are awesome. But does it really mean your tweet was a success? Judging by the amount of brands tweeting lolcats, I guess not.
In a business context, a real successful tweet is about more than just making people laugh. Here are 3 ways to find out if a tweet was truly successful:
- Did it build you a bigger audience?
Having an audience ensures you of people receiving your messages. The reason you use Facebook, Twitter and a mailinglist is because you can communicate about new products and services to this presumably interested audience.
A true successful tweets brings in new audience members. These could be Twitter followers, but also Facebook fans or mailinglist subscribers.
To discover the true impact of a tweet, you'll need to combine the data about your tweet performance with data from Facebook and your mailinglist. - Did it educate your audience about your offering?
These tweets you are sending out our tiny drops of marketing, educating the client tweet by tweet about the products and services you offer, and the kind of company you are.
Getting twitter followers to your website and having them browse around for a while, is an import metric for twitter success. The more pages these twitter visitors consume, the more appealing your offering proves to be. - Did it convert your audience?
In the end, the goal always is getting people to *buy or apply*. People following you and consuming your content are merely steps in the process.
So what you really should do to measure twitter success, is combining your twitter data with your conversion data. You'll soon find out which twitter content is generating true leads on your website.
Not all tweets are created equal
"Are you saying all that engagement is meaningless?" you ask. Yes and no.
In the short run, you might be happy with engagement alone. But it won't last long if this engagement is not translating into one of the above. Engagement is what it is: a valuable means to an end.