Measuring a Twitter Campaign on a Budget

Great, you’ve designed a Twitter campaign that you’re sure is going to go viral, now all you need to do is work out how you’re going to measure it.

The first thing you need to do is work out what your ‘done’ is. Is your campaign about your hashtag reaching as wide an audience as possible, is it about attracting more Twitter followers, collecting stories, or is it about driving people to a conversion page?

Hashtag Stats

Measuring stats on a hashtag is rarely a terribly useful metric, but it does have merits when used in conjunction with other key performance indicators. I use Hashtracking to measure the hashtag stats side of any campaign. The free service will measure up to 1,500 tweets over a 24-hour period. If you think your campaign will top-out at over 1,500 tweets or go on for more than 24-hours, I recommend using their paid-for service (currently $40USD).

Hashtracking will measure the number of tweets containing your hashtag, the reach of those tweets, and the impressions they generate.

This may go without saying, but if you want reliable stats on your hashtag ensure that your hashtag is unique to your campaign.

Twitter Followers

Well this is easy, you can take note of your followers before the campaign starts, and again when it’s finished. If that sounds a bit too much like hard work, you can always turn to Twitter Counter (they’ll even give you a graph).

Collecting Stories

Asking people to tweet their stories to a hashtag can be a great way of sourcing case-studies and identifying online ambassadors. Storify is a great free way to publicly curate these stories.

Conversions

This comes down to your on-site analytics package. Google Analytics is a great free tool and the good people at Google have some really useful resources to help you get started.

One final note before you kick-off your campaign – Read the Twitter “Guidelines for Contests onTwitter”