Archive for the ‘Trackers’ tag
How to measure a Twitter campaign with TweetReach
You’ve planned out your Twitter campaign; you’ve strategized and you’re ready to launch. Now, how to measure the impact of those tweet? (You want solid numbers that reflect all of your hard work, after all.) You have several options with TweetReach, depending on your budget and time.
Twitter measurement doesn’t have to be a bear. [Image courtesy of the New York Public Library Digital Gallery]
Use our free snapshot reports as soon as you launch your campaign, and capture information at the end of every day. Do it ASAP to get the best info – tweets are only available for a few days. No account is required, but you can create one to save your reports- extra backups never hurt! Are you getting more participation than anticipated? Purchase a full report and capture up to 1500 tweets about your campaign. Just 20 bucks.
I want to set up everything once, not have to worry about capturing data every day.
Set up an ongoing, real-time TweetReach Pro Tracker and it will capture all your results from the beginning of your campaign to the end. And no 1500-tweet limit, so it’s great for larger conversations. Each Tracker monitors up to fifteen search queries, so you can track all iterations of your campaign hashtags (hey, people make spelling mistakes!) and keywords. You can later edit your Trackers once they’ve started, if you see participants start using their own hashtags or other keywords you also want to track.
What if I want to go back at the end and capture data for something I missed initially?
Say you notice halfway through your campaign that participants have created their own extra hashtag or started using keywords you didn’t anticipate, and you want to capture that data. Or maybe you didn’t remember to set up tracking in advance, or you just got an analytics budget. We can access any older tweets with our premium historical analytics. No matter how far back or how many tweets, we can get to anything from Twitter’s full archive, all the way back to March 2006.
Have you used TweetReach to track a campaign? How’d it go? Tell us about it in the comments!
TweetReach Tip: Find & engage influencers on Twitter with TweetReach Trackers
We’ve already covered how to find influencers when you run a TweetReach snapshot report, but how about on a Tracker? They are set up a little differently. On a Tracker, you’ll want to check out the Top Contributors section, obviously:
In this case, we’re looking at a Tracker for Canadian astronaut and current Commander of the International Space Station (ISS) Chris Hadfield, tracking his Twitter handle @Cmdr_Hadfield. In this case, the contributors will be people who are retweeting, mentioning and talking to Commander Hadfield on Twitter. This shows you in a glance who is doing that and generating the most impressions from it.
Looking more closely at contributors is also a great way to connect with those who are influential in your industry, or about the topic (or account) you’re tracking. This shows you who to follow and talk to in a specific industry or around a certain topic. You can do this by clicking on any username anywhere in your Tracker, which will take you to our contributor detail page, which includes more information about the account and how much that person has contributed to the topic you’re tracking. It looks like this:
You can see that this account is engaged with Commander Hadfield’s – they’re the top contributor behind Hadfield himself – and generated a respectable amount of retweets for a tweet they sent out showcasing the recent turnover in ISS command. You can also see more detailed information about the account, such as how many tweets and impressions they’ve contributed mentioning or retweeting Commander Hadfield, as well as their average retweet rate, amplification, and more.
Aside from Top Contributors, you will also want to look at the Highest Exposure and Most Retweeted tweet listing sections:
Pictured: Tweet with the highest exposure
Pictured: most retweeted tweets for this Tracker
Watch to see which users show up in your Tracker’s most popular tweet with any regularity; these are definitely people to connect with – if you aren’t already connected – because they’re interested in your content and they get a lot of attention from whatever they’re putting out into their own stream. These accounts are great to engage with by following back, having conversations with, and retweeting interesting content, if that’s appropriate for your brand or approach. You can also engage by seeing if they take part in Twitter chats, and if they’re about a relevant topic or industry, join in. This will lead you to more likeminded people to connect with.
How do you use your Trackers and reports to find influencers? Tell us your story in the comments below!
Introducing TweetReach Tracker 2.0
Today, we’re rolling out the beta version of our new Tracker interface to select TweetReach Pro customers! We can’t wait for you to see it. It includes the same full-fidelity, real-time tracking as before, but we’ve totally rethought and redesigned the Tracker look and feel. Whether you need a quick campaign summary or want to drill into the details, we think you’ll find that every part of the new Tracker puts the most relevant information right where you need it. We’ll be releasing it more widely over the next few weeks, but in the meantime, here’s a sneak peek of the new look (click for a larger version).
As you know, TweetReach Trackers provide premium real-time monitoring and comprehensive tweet coverage, and are included in TweetReach Pro subscription. And we’ve had the same Tracker design for more than two years, and it’s time for a facelift. The new look is cleaner and simpler and gives you the information you need at a glance. In addition, we’re now able to add a few more metrics to your Tracker’s summary page.
During the beta rollout, Pro subscribers will continue to have access to the previous interface, and will be able to switch between the new look and the old look. We’d love to hear your feedback as we continue to polish the new design.
Speaking of changes to TweetReach, have you seen the rest of the updates we made this week to incorporate the changes to Twitter’s API? Please let us know if you have any questions!
Announcing our new reach algorithm
This post was written by Union Metrics CEO and Founder Hayes Davis.
We started TweetReach in 2009 with a simple idea: to provide a simple report that showed people the reach of tweets about any topic. Since that time, we’ve grown far beyond that simple reach report and added comprehensive tracking, as well as many other metrics and insights. But reach is still something we care a great deal about, so I wanted to tell you about some changes we’re making to the algorithm we use to calculate reach.
This is a long post, so here’s the executive summary:
- We’ve built a new and extremely robust model for calculating reach that will replace our current algorithm.
- Historical reach data won’t change, and newly calculated reach will change only slightly in most cases relative to historical trends.
- This new algorithm allows us to increase our data limits across all TweetReach Pro plans.
- These changes go into effect next week.
For those of you who are interested in learning more about how we built our new algorithm, read on.
Setting the stage
Reach is a complex metric with many definitions across vendors and industries, so let me explain how we think about reach on Twitter. For us, reach is the total number of unique Twitter accounts that received at least one tweet about a topic in some period. Knowing this helps you understand how broadly your message is being distributed on Twitter.
For most of our existence we’ve measured reach by using Twitter’s API to determine the actual Twitter IDs of users who received tweets about a topic. From that copious raw data, we then applied a dose of math and lots of computational horsepower to derive our reach measurement. While this brute force method produces a very reasonable estimate for reach, it has some serious drawbacks in terms of meeting the needs of our customers. It slows down our reporting for customers pulling data on ad-hoc periods and – while our data limits are generous relative to our competitors – it meant we had to place stricter data limits than we wanted on our TweetReach Pro plans.
In addition to these increasingly frustrating drawbacks, Twitter has announced a major set of technical changes to their API. Included in those changes are additional restrictions on the API calls we make to determine the raw data we use in our reach calculation. So instead of working around those API limits and continuing with our brute force approach, we decided it was time to get smarter.
Investigating the data
At TweetReach, one thing we have is data – lots and lots of data. This means that we have an extraordinarily large archive of information about how campaigns work on Twitter, which goes back years and is unique to us. From these data and our experience, we know that the reach of a Twitter campaign is essentially a function of the number of unique contributors (users tweeting), how large their follower bases are, and the overall number of tweets. The question is: What are the mathematical parameters of that function?
We started our investigation by looking at what we call the “potential reach” of any conversation on Twitter. This is the maximum possible reach of any conversation if all people who tweet about a topic have no followers in common. While it provides an upper bound on reach, it’s obviously flawed; the assumption that no one has followers in common just doesn’t make common sense. It is, however, a good starting point, so we put it in a scatter plot to at least see if there was a relationship between potential reach and actual reach:
The way this graph turns upward at the end shows us there’s not a clear linear relationship in this data, but there might be if we plotted this on a log-log graph.
There is a nice positive linear correlation after all. However, there are also some pretty absurd numbers. In fact, some of those “up and to the right” data points in the first graph show a potential reach above 2 billion (nearly 30% of the world’s population and more than 8x Twitter’s 250 million monthly active users). As it turns out, this is what many in our industry call “reach”. But we knew we could do better.
Enter statistics
Armed with the notion that potential reach had some value, we set out to combine that with other data to build an algorithm that could predict reach. We experimented with many different approaches that we applied to tens of thousands of data points derived from real Twitter campaigns. And after many iterations, we’ve developed an extremely robust model that explains 99.51% of the variance in reach on a Twitter campaign.
Below is another scatter plot (with a trendline) that shows our reach prediction model applied to a test data set.
The data have a nearly 1:1 positive linear correlation, and there are no crazy outliers. This means we can predict an accurate reach with an extremely high degree of confidence without having to resort to brute-force methods.
What does this mean for our customers?
For the vast majority of our customers there will be very little noticeable impact to reach. Most of you won’t see any change at all. But a few of you will see some small changes. We will not be altering our reach calculations for historical periods, so some of you may notice your future reach increase or decrease slightly when compared to historical levels. And since no model is absolutely perfect, a small set of customers may see somewhat larger increases in reach for certain campaigns. If you have any questions at all about a change in your reach, don’t hesitate to contact our support team and we’ll be happy to take a look!
But best of all, these changes bring some significant benefits to our TweetReach Pro subscribers. The first benefit is that viewing ad-hoc periods within a TweetReach Tracker will now be much faster than before. The second, much more exciting benefit, is that we’re now able to increase our data limits for TweetReach Pro plans.
We’ll be rolling these changes out next week and we’ll be communicating with you along the way. We’re extremely excited to share the results of this work with you – our customers! If you have any questions, please let us know.
Today’s TweetReach Tip: Common Tracker mistakes
Much like the double-tap method is essential for zombie eradication, double- and triple-checking your Tracker queries is essential to success with your TweetReach Pro Trackers. Be sure you aren’t making any of the following common mistakes with your Tracker setup, and you’ll get the best results possible with your Tracker.
Mistake #1: Not making the tweets you send from your own Twitter account easily trackable.
- Put your hashtag toward the beginning of your campaign tweets. If you put it toward the end, it could get cut off in subsequent retweets. Also be sure you keep your campaign tweets to a shorter, shareable length; the “perfect tweet length appears to be around 100 characters”, according to a study by TrackSocial.
- If you begin a tweet with someone’s Twitter handle – for example, @tweetreachapp – only that account and anyone who follows both of you will see it. Be sure to add a period or other text to the beginning of the tweet if you want to gain the largest impression possible: “.@tweetreachapp is a great tool”. You can read more about @replies and impressions on our helpdesk. The bottom line: if you want to track a tweet and get the most data about it possible, don’t start it with a Twitter handle.
Mistake #2: Small errors in your Tracker queries can keep you from getting the data you need.
- Make sure you’ve set up the right search terms in your Tracker. For example, banana won’t capture tweets including the word bananas. And #banana will only find uses of the hashtag, but not general uses of the word banana. Add multiple queries if you need to (banana, bananas, #banana AND #bananas).
- Make sure you spell your search terms correctly. It seems basic, but checking on this will save you from missing data. Also keep be sure to add queries to include accented characters and punctuation, as well as alternative spellings. For example: “shop ‘til you drop” and “shop til you drop”, or dakar perú and dakar peru.
- Make sure you’re using the right form of your hashtag, or search for multiple hashtags if appropriate. Likewise, make sure the tweets you’re sending out have the correct hashtag, and do what you can to communicate the official version to participants. Sometimes, you may need to adapt and track audience-generated hashtags; the official form doesn’t always get the use you’re expecting.
Want more tips on improving your search queries? You can read all about it here. And if you have any questions about your Trackers, just ask!