Using Twitter for Twitter stats

By Steve Keenan

In preparing monthly reports for travel clients on how well their social media is faring, I’m a fan of Twitonomy in gathering data on Twitter.

It gives you a pile of stats for free, including collated figures on the reach of a tweet, graphs and the location of those mentioning you. From that, it’s fairly easy (but a bit laborious) to find out which tweets worked best and how far they travelled.

There are other research sites that give bits for free although, naturally, the best information has to be paid for. We’re always looking for which sites provide the best data, and have recently been playing with Sumall.

As we’re not looking for big brand data, Sumall seems to fit the bill - good data at a reasonable price (from $9 a month), as it’s aimed at small to medium businesses. I receive a daily breakdown which handily gives a breakdown on mention reach (see snapshot, below) - possibly the most important figure you need.

But I must admit that I’ve been overlooking the best source of analytics about Twitter - Twitter itself. I was reminded this week when I received an email from Twitter concerning a personal account and announcing a new Tweet activity dashboard

For some time now, Twitter has been offering free stats to advertisers. But now the company is pushing the message that anyone can access the stats without having to advertise. Here’s the thing: you just have to lodge your credit card details with Twitter first.

I have. And here’s what Twitter is now giving me:

* How much interaction my tweets have achieved
* Impressions, engagement rate, link clicks, RTs, favourites and replies
* Ability to export analytics
* Compare impressions, total engagements and RTs month on month

The screen grab from the top of the page is from these stats. When you open a Twitter business account and enter your credit card information, go to the “Analytics” tab and select “Tweet Activity”.

I don’t dismiss the possibility of using promoted accounts and tweets - Twitter says that 90% of followers you buy will stay with you for six months or more (it’s a subject I wrote about a couple of months ago.)

But I will take advantage of the stats more in preparing reports, while sticking with Twitonomy and learning more about Sumall. You can’t have too much information.

Newsjacking the #worldcup

By Mark Frary

If you are on Twitter, you won’t need any introduction to the concept of newsjacking. It is the, some say shameless, practice of jumping on board something that is happening in the news and generating some social coverage for your brand. The practice is particularly prevalent in sporting events, with one of the most memorable examples when chocolate and cream biscuit Oreo posted the following picture on its Twitter account when the lights went out during the 2013 Superbowl.

The phenomenon is closely linked to the idea of second-screen use - watching TV while simultaneously using another device, such as a smartphone or tablet. Research by Octagon into second screen usage showed that 76% of adults have used a second screen in the past year while watching a sports match on TV, up from 62% in 2011. the same research showed that 66% of women and 49% of men regularly use Facebook while watching sport while 32% of women and 26% of men regularly use Twitter.

This summer’s football World Cup is likely to be the most watched TV event ever - FIFA is predicting a total audience of 3.2 billion. In the UK, England’s first World Cup match averaged a TV audience of 11.51 million, reaching a peak of 15.65 million, despite not kicking off until 11pm. Other matches, such as Iran-Nigeria, are getting audiences of around 5 million.

This, combined with growing device usage, means it is also set to the biggest second screen event ever. As a result, brands - both official World Cup sponsors and others - have been preparing their social media plans carefully for the month-long tournament to take advantage. Many larger organisations have even set up social war rooms to be able to react in real time to events that happen during matches.

The trick with newsjacking, as Oreo found out, is not just to add a trending hashtag to something entirely unrelated, for example posting a bit of unimportant company news and just putting #worldcup on the end. Humour and establishing a social tone of voice is more important.

The World Cup is so rich in incident and stories that linking something to your brand is not too difficult.

Take the recent group game between Brazil and Mexico. The game ended in a 0-0 draw after some spectacular goalkeeping from Mexico stopper Guillermo Ochoa (@yosoy8a on Twitter), who deservedly won man of the match.

How about this tweet after the match?

You won’t see many better saves during the #worldcup than @yosoy8a…apart from our beach holiday offers to Mexico www.bit.ly/ochoaoffers #shameslessnewsjack #crapjoke

The hashtags at the end are show that you are doing this in a knowing way with a nod to the users of social networks, even though you are trying to win some clicks.

During the same match, Brazil’s Marcelo blatantly dived in the penalty box after a slight touch from Mexico’s Jimenez.

If you are a diving holiday specialist, you could have tweeted the following:

Need to learn to dive better @12MarceloV? Why not book one of our beginner holidays at www.diveholidaysrus.com/marcelo

(Note the use of a dedicated landing page on your website so you can track who uses it.)

Yet as Oreo found out, newsjacking often works best for increasing the awareness of a brand rather than pushing specific offers. This means creating so-called “native” content - things that do not stand out as bandwagon-jumping calls to action but instead create a sense of warmth among social media users.

With so many people watching the football and so many using second screens at the same time, getting reach and winning new followers who like your sense of humour and style is all important. You can save the calls to action until after the last ball of the World Cup has been kicked.

The social media expert is dead. Discuss

By Steve Keenan

There have been a few more blog posts doing the rounds recently announcing the death of the social media consultant. The broad argument goes that, as companies have gotten used to SM, so then they no longer need to outsource this work.

Pronouncing the death of a genre, or breed, is headline grabbing. A bit like this one. It’s the shouting bloke at the bar, the black-is-the-new-white kind of statement that ignores all subtlety and counter-argument.

Bookshops have been heading for extinction for decades, that sort of argument goes. Indeed, digital downloads of books overtook sales of hard back versions yesterday. But while numbers of bookshops have dropped, there are still 1,000 in the UK. That’s a decline, not a death.

A social media consulting career is not terminal. Companies are recruiting in-house because SM is becoming mainstream. It’s part of marketing, and companies have always had marketeers - now they want ones with new skills, to do particular SM jobs. That’s for the bigger firms. As technology breeds new opportunities, social media twists and contorts into new directions. There is always something new to learn, and there will always be consultants with something to teach those who don’t, or can’t stay abreast of developments. Usually because they are busy.

The breed that is dying is the social media expert, because one person cannot know it all. As blogger Dave of Detroit says in a post: “We try things, we experiment, and we have some moderate amount of success with certain things… but we’re not experts.”

He posted the blog in April. But on closer inspection, it was originally posted in January, 2012. Given the rate of change in 30 months, certainly no-one could profess themselves an expert now. Read Mike Sowden’s blog this week, arguing that social media is only an adjunct, a sidebar to other forms of marketing.

So the picture gets increasingly fragmented and complicated. Which means one of two things for the person formerly known as an expert consultant. Firstly, they have become specialists, an expert on Instagram. Or Java. Facebook, maybe, or video. Even storytelling (aka a journalist).

Or they have stayed as all-rounders but for clients with much smaller expectations. Big brands will always use big agencies (who may well be experts) and are hiring in-house. But the small to medium companies, the SMEs, are still only getting to grips with social media.

I’ve noticed just in the past month a small but significant interest from this market, hitherto awed by, or dismissive of, social media. These SMEs don’t want viral and paid-for campaigns, reams of expensive original content and analytics beyond Google. They want someone to tell them how best to use Twitter and Facebook, maybe Instagram and possibly Pinterest. How to load a decent photo, get a good video for under £1,000 and what stories to write. And when to post them.

One consultant can do that for, say, a year and get paid around £5,000. And they can do it for five or six SMEs and make a decent living. Hell, then they can almost call themselves an expert.

Cape Town: a city that ‘gets’ social media

By Steve Keenan

In 2009, in the run-up to the World Cup, Cape Town Tourism rolled out its first digital tourism marketing strategy. Five years later, the city is now widely recognised as one of the world’s leading destinations when it comes to making best use of digital and social media.

It’s fair to say that one woman spearheaded the far-sighted revolution. In the early part of the millennium, Mariette du Toit-Hembold had pulled together the city’s fragmented tourism industry under one roof - an achievement many destinations still work toward.

And in 2004, at the aged of 28, she became the first CEO of the newly-formed Cape Town Tourism (CTT). The brand has gone on to collect a trophy cabinet of gongs and accolades for its marketing strategy and innovation, including recognition from the UN World Tourism Organisation and US magazine Travel & Leisure (#SMITTY award for best overall use of social media globally).

After nearly a decade at the helm, she left CTT last autumn to set up her own tourism marketing agency in Cape Town, Desinate, having helped secure three more years of funding from the city. Cape Town Tourism is in a strong position to keep innovating in social and digital.

In a video interview, she summarised how the city went about embracing the new mediums. “We all know that the world has changed fundamentally. Our world is so much more social now and it’s so important to have the customer at the centre of our marketing.”

Its Facebook page has 311k fans, one of the world’s biggest in tourism, helped by a FB game launched in 2012 but with a tremendous attention to constantly posting content. “The secret has been to allow it to grow organically,” she said. “Really investing in time and effort and getting cool people to work on it who really ‘get it’ and to continue to innovate and learn.”

A key strategy has also been to build around the hashtag #lovecapetown. The idea is to encourage Cape Town residents and visitors to create content, so that the potential customer has peer-to-peer information and reviews to rely on - it’s not just Cape Town Tourism pushing a message. The CTT website has a #lovecapetown section, “for the people who love Cape Town, by the people who love Cape Town.” It is a space ‘for authentic voices and personal stories. Your pictures, your blog posts, your #lovecapetown moments,’ it adds.

Says Du Toit-Hembold: “The essence of everything we do is about the stories we generate. We have provided platforms for people to tell those stories - and for us to stand back and not interfere. There’s nothing plastic about it - it’s very real and authentic.”

The philosophy has become central in the past five years. Keith Jenkins, CEO of travel blogger consultancy iAmbassadors, worked with CTT on two #lovecapetown projects, bringing overseas bloggers to the city, in 2012 and 2013.

“The campaigns contained a big element of crowdsourcing travel tips,” he says. “The iAmbassador bloggers were basically utilised to get Capetonians to talk about their city and share their favourite spots and tips. The result was a barrage of tips via Twitter (Capetonians are very tuned into social media) which were collected and displayed on the Cape Town Tourism blog.

“A point to make is also how well CTT has integrated traditional media channels into the #lovecapetown campaign, mobilising newspapers, radio and TV stations to cover the campaign, interviewing the bloggers and doing all sorts of articles. I loved how traditional and new media were weaved together so seamlessly to give the relatively small campaign a lot more weight.”

Integrating traditional media and continued use of the hashtag are clever and sensible ideas. It’s a long-term strategy after all, with CTT helping accommodate everybody to promote the city together - and not launching a series of one-off, unrelated projects as so many Destination Management Organisations (DMOs) still do.