ThoughtBuzz
This following post was featured on Mediavataar.com. You can view the original interview here.
If only I had a dime for every new analytical tool or platform out there ! A lot has changed since the traditional marketing days of yesteryears but the fundamental thinking of marketers and tech guys hasn’t! There is a serious lack of immersive understanding of the medium and what makes those channels unique. I do have a lot of respect and love for developers who are really whacking their brains to create something that is real, enriching and useful. But there’s room for some serious improvement.
The focus of most analytical platforms has been on figuring out how to collect and report ever more data rather than giving actionable stuff.
Let’s look at twitter and decipher how Klout is useful to a marketer.
Klout is calculated as (True Reach + Amplification Probability + Network Score)/ Standard score x Weights. Now that we have a single number, we also have something thats USELESS ! Compounded metrics are great for comparisons but for a business that wants to understand the dynamics of this medium, a drill down is necessary.
But interestingly Klout also offers some metrics for Twitter grouped into 3 categories:
a. Reach - (followers/total retweets x Friends + Pixie dust). This defines if your tweets are interesting and information enough to build an audience. It also tells you how far your content has been spread on Twitter and if people are adding you to their lists and if that list is further being followed.
b. Engagement - Defines how diverse is the group that @ messages you and if you are simply participating or broadcasting in a conversation.
c. Velocity - Defines how likely you are to be retweeted. It also defines if a lot of people retweet you or if it is the same bunch of people.
Always pick a metric that are important to your twitter strategy
A great metric to go by is - number of retweets per 1000 followers. It helps you understand if your tweets have real value and if people liked it.
This is just tip of the iceberg. What’s really interesting is identifying your loyal followers, measuring churn rates etc. And is it possible to go beyond quantitative to the qualitative, identify emotions ? More on that soon…
