Cli.gs is a tool for social media analytics

For those of you who are happily using Twitter as a business tool, it probably won’t take long before you start to wonder if all those shortened links are doing you much good.

Certainly you can look in your analytics for Twitter as a referrer. But that won’t tell you much as the link itself gets passed along. Also, if you’re linking to a site for which you don’t have analytics access, you won’t know your level of influence (or your followership’s interest in the topic you posted).

Cligs similar to ListingNumber: a service that will give you a short URL along with some basic tracking information. You can track your link as folks pass it along from Twitter to blogs to wherever.

Just like comparing impression-based advertising with click-based advertising, you can measure your influence and the “quality” of your followership. What’s your click-through rate on Twitter? Use Cligs and find out: Clicks divided by followers. Sweet.

Another handy thing with Cligs is that they forward with a 301 redirect. This means that search engines will index your content directly. Pretty handy for SEO.
To make things easier, Cligs has a bookmarklet, so you can quickly shorten links and dump them into Twitter. Then all you have to do is watch the clicks roll in.

Simple, fairly blunt instrument.

What kind of insights might you discover by measuring click-throughs from Twitter?

Well, as with most social networking tools and sites, there gets to be an obsession with how many followers anyone has. At first, that’s always the easiest metric to gather: “I have 70 followers, I must be important.” But if you post your blog link and no one clicks on it, maybe you’re just a blowhard and folks are ignoring you. Or maybe all those followers are spambots or something. Who knows.

Since you are tracking your click through on a per-post basis, you might also use Cligs to help figure out what interests your followership.

Using Cli.gs to help you listen to your audience

As of today I have 71 followers. So outside of random people clicking from the Twitter home page, if I completely overload the Interest circuits I’ll get all 71 of those followers to follow the link. Pretty unlikely, I’ll admit. Here are some real world examples from some recent links I sent out on Twitter:

• 13%: A mention of the internet marketing intern position that is open at Union Street (incidentally, I added the USM careers page as a result of feedback I gathered from 4q… boy I’m a good listener)
• 18%: Quick thoughts about some information that @jowyang shared
• 20%: Union Street’s Groundswell Award submission.
• 21%: A link to my old animation reel
• 34%: A notice about AnalyticsView having a free options

Based on this raw data it looks like I can maybe count on about nine or ten folks to follow my links on a regular basis. And perhaps upwards 15 if it’s something that really gets them.

Suggestion for Cli.gs: Add the time of day the clig was created. Twitter, being mostly ephemeral, is very sensitive to time-of-day differences. We could, of course, Twitter-stalk all of our followers to identify when they are most likely to be active and then make your most important Tweets at that time… but the “time created” would probably be quicker and effective enough.

Update: Day after I posted this, Cli.gs updated their analytics interface. Now they have a graph how the Clig is used over time (at the resolution of one day). It would still be sweet to get a time-of-day chart for all Clig’s so we could identify what time is best to release our best Tweets.

Review of uses for Cligs in measuring Twitter

Here’s the rundown in a bullet list because everyone loves bullet lists:

• Measure your influence
• Find out what your audience’s interests are, based on what they click

What have I missed? How would you use the service?

Mobile phone? Sure. For texting.

Neilsen is reporting that “Americans each sent or received 357 text messages a month then, compared with 204 phone calls.” Moreover, this is the third quarter in a row that text messages beat out phone calls.

After the break, the chart that gives a breakdown of usage by age. Some of which might surprise you. Read more

Measuring Twitter: Marketing, Conversations and Individuals

This post is a part of the overall Twitter for Business series here at the Internet Marketing for Real Estate blog. Once you get into Twitter for awhile you (or our boss) will want to know what good it is doing. Here are some links to posts and articles about Twitter measurement tools and techniques.

Measuring advertising and marketing efforts that use Twitter as a distribution medium/source

Increasingly, we see that Twitter is being used to blast away with “Hey check out my latest post” and “use my great service” etc. Perhaps a bit obnoxious to the non-commercial user of Twitter. If your marketing strategy for Twitter does not involve annoying your followers into submission, perhaps you might consider measuring your activity and finding out which topics are most interesting to your followers. Here’s where you can really use social media to advantage. Check out these reviews on using Twitter in conjunction with your advertising and marketing efforts:

• Before you even get started, you might want to know more about who is using Twitter and how are they using it. Jeremiah Owyang has decoded HP Lab’s Twitter research for you.
• Twittertise is an analytics and Tweet-delay service that helps you plan and track your advertising messages.
• Measure web traffic you generate via Twitter by combining TinyURL and Google Analytics. Justin Cutroni tells all.
• Use Tweetburner to measure your relevance on Twitter.
• Measure your relevance on Twitter with Cli.gs and get some 301 redirect action from it as well.
• Anil Batra has some initial KPIs for Twitter use on his blog.
• The Webtrends Blog has published a method for tracking Twitter and Facebook marketing campaigns with Webtrends.
• An important concept to Twitter message spreading is the Retweet. Dan Zarella outlines some metrics for understanding how and when a message is repeated over Twitter via a Retweet.

Measuring brands, topics and conversations on Twitter

Since Twitter is a quick, easy and in-the-moment communication medium, a lot of different things are discussed each minute. Perhaps you’re interested in buzz measurement or looking for some insight into what the Twittersphere currently finds interesting.

• If you want to use free tools to figure out how much of the Twittersphere is talking about something, check out our Twist and Tweetrush method.
• If your brand/topic isn’t very large, perhaps you could measure the conversation using Tweetbeep and Tweetrush
• Here’s a brief case study about the impact of the 2008 Seinfeld ads on Microsoft’s brand as measured via Twitter.

Measuring individual activity on Twitter

Perhaps you are interested in what someone’s Twitter usage is like. Maybe they are claiming to be a social media marketing whiz-bang genius and you want to check out their credentials. That sort of thing. Or maybe you’re just a stalker. There are a variety of tools available to measure people’s use of Twitter.

• Xefer is a tool that shows hourly, monthly and daily breakdown of twitter usage. It also shows followers. It is limited to the most recen 800 Twitter posts.
• Adam Fullerton gives a quick snapshot of Hubspot’s Twitter Grader, a tool for checking how complete your Twitter profile is among other things.
• Mashable gives an excellent overview of a tool called Tweeple Twak. Learn about your follow/unfollow rate, locations of your followers and more. Probably the closest thing to GA for Twitter I’ve seen yet. If only it would have a built-in URL shortener or partner with someone like Cli.gs then it would be slam dunk.
• Respected Web Analyst Nick Arnet puts together an excellent blog post on measuring influence on Twitter.

If I’ve missed something good please don’t hesitate to let me know in the comments section.

Asking for information from potential customers

A frequent conversation around the office involves how much information to gather from customers and when. On our search product there is a constant discussion over whether our clients should force users to register in order to search (sometimes there are regulations around this). And then there’s the contact form that asks for every possible detail about a potential customer’s life. I counted 38 fields in one recently. Imagine meeting someone for the first time and then they ask you 38 questions about yourself.

Just because we can ask for information doesn’t mean we should. When putting together forms we should really only ask for information that we need in order to help the person who fills it out. If we aren’t sending them something in the mail do we really need to know their street address? Small things like this make a big difference.

In a conversation about the proposed privacy features of IE8, Jim Sterne devised a tiered set of access and features to give to site visitors based on the information they allow us to gather. Notice how each level of information sharing relates directly to the kinds of features the customer gets. There should be a one-to-one mapping between the data we gather and the benefit we provide.

Measuring the Conversation for Smaller Businesses

KDPaine linked to my post about measuring the conversation and noted the problem of measuring conversation share for smaller business: if your brand doesn’t generate much chatter you just won’t show up at all in Tweetrush. Here are a few quick thoughts on this. Read more

Measure your share of Twitter-based conversations using Tweetrush and Twist

Ever wonder how many different “Tweets” are released into the Twittersphere each day? That’s what Tweetrush tells you. At first glance, it’s probably not much more than an entertaining look at how other people waste their time. Then you realize that you’re wasting your time seeing how much time their wasting and so on.

Let’s see if we can use Tweetrush and Twist to inform our decision-making. Read more

New Real Estate Social Media Adoption Survey

CREST, which recently released results from its first survey, apparently believes that no moss gathers on a rolling stone. They have prepared their second survey. This time focusing on social media and widgets.

If you are a real estate pro with any sort of web presence at all please head over there and take the CREST Social Media Adoption survey.

Your customers in their own words. Setting up GA Keyword filters.

One of the things I talked about at the analytics panel at Inman this year was “reading your customers’ minds” via the keyword reports. One of the audience members from the panel asked me to explain how to set up one of my branded or non-branded keyword reports in Google Analytics (obligatory schilling: USM clients often have this set up for them from day one). I’ll give the step-by-step at the end but first let’s catch everyone up in case they missed the Inman panel. Read more

Fireworks results

Just a quick update to my post about why real estate bloggers might want to take on the 4th of July:

With Independence day just a few days away, people are looking for some information on the upcoming fourth of July fireworks in Burlington. They found my post. I bet they’ll find it next year too, and the year after and the year after… If someone has a link to their blog post about the fireworks in Burlington let me know so I can help these folks out.

Now remember, this whole “blog the cool local events” thing is definitely a tactic that fits squarely in a long-tail strategy so if you aren’t into that, then this won’t convince you to bring your camera to the show.

As a side note, notice how the searchers use semi-natural language in the search as well. Worth thinking about…

Do you blog? Please take this survey.

VARBuzz is running a survey on the effectiveness of blogging/social media. Please take a moment to fill out the survey if you are a real estate blogger. Thanks to Mark Eckinrode for the heads up.

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