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Weekly Advice: 3 New Ways to Prove Twitter is Not a Waste of Time

If there is one thing I'm sure about, it is that Twitter is an amazing tool that will increase a wedding professional's visibility - for free! But how can you be sure that your time and effort in Twitter is actually working? As the title of this post states, I have discovered three new ways to measure the impact of Twitter. For those of you who are new to Twitter, you may want to read my recent post, which outlines some Twitter tips and tricks to get started.
First, define your Twitter goals upfront. Do you want to use Twitter to increase the awareness of your wedding services? Do you want to drive traffic to your blog? Are you trying to convey your expertise in a certain field? Once you establish what you are trying to achieve, you can turn to these tools to track whether your efforts are successful.

Tools for Measuring Twitter Results
1. Bit.ly: Enables you to shorten, share, and most importantly, track links. Once you use Bit.ly to shorten a link, you can post it on social networks such as Twitter. The great thing is that Bit.ly enables you to view reports on the number of people who have seen and clicked on these links.

2. Hootsuite: This application saves you time by organizing all of your Twitter followers and messages. More importantly, Hootsuite comes with a stats tab where you can view graphs and demographics of users that have clicked on your shared links.

3. Trendrr: Enables you to track Twitter searches over time. You can create reports to understand the impact of your campaigns and programs. Trendrr allows you to track the popularity and awareness of various keywords, blog buzz, and video views - all in real time. For a fee, you can also receive emails when something you are tracking goes viral.

After getting acquainted with these tools, you can set up your reports. Remember to monitor them regularly. Even the most experienced marketer needs to monitor and tweak efforts over time. How have you measured the impact of Twitter? Are there any other tools or tactics that you'd like to share? If so, please comment below.

About This Blog: Christine Dyer has an MBA in marketing and shares over ten years of marketing expertise with the wedding community. In this weekly blog called Supercharge Your Wedding Business, you'll find advice on an array of wedding business topics such as how to market to brides, social networking, wedding PR, wedding sales, vendor networking, branding, pricing and much more. .Please pass this news along to your own professional wedding network. To receive this advice in your email inbox each week, Sign Up for a Free BridalTweet Membership.

Comment by Picture My Wedding on September 28, 2009 at 7:49pm: Do you know which is the best app to enable and manage emails to your followers?
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Lisa
picturemywedding.ca

Comment by Tracy from Recycled Bride on September 29, 2009 at 3:13am: Thanks for the great post, Christine! I can't wait to implement all three of the tools you recommended. It will be fantastic to be able to quantify exactly what Twitter doing for my business. I look forward to reading more of your marketing tips in the coming weeks, and appreciate you sharing your expertise with the community!
Tracy DiNunzio
www.RecycledBride.com

Comment by abbey and izzie designs on September 29, 2009 at 11:52am: Great post Christine, thank you! I look forward to the next one!
Lisa

Comment by Sleepy Hedgehog Press on September 29, 2009 at 12:14pm: Thank you - I definitely learned something and sure could
learn a bunch more! Looking forward to your next post.

Comment by Patrick McCutchan on September 29, 2009 at 12:17pm: Thank you,

Patrick B. McCutchan a famous photographer
http://www.patrickmccutchan.com

Comment by Emee at EJP Events on September 29, 2009 at 12:50pm: Great stuff. One thing I also use, is Google Analytics to track how people get to my website and blog. Twitter is one of the top referrers -- so, another proof that it's not a waste of time!

Comment by WeddingMediator on September 29, 2009 at 1:06pm: Christine, you know I love BT and consider it my wedding community. Members are generous with their know-how and support and I couldn't appreciate that more.

As for Twitter, it's given my coaching/training company a big leg up!( In fact, I should blog about that- Thanks!) Initially, I was clueless. It was little difficult to fall into the rhythm of conversation, but now I'm feeling a little more talkative. And, it's fun. I just discovered CoTweet, a hybrid search tool. It's useful for finding other folks talking about your topic and other good stuff.

Really looking forward to your upcoming posts. You give great content!

Comment by Let Memories Roll on September 29, 2009 at 1:21pm: Great Post. I have used Bit.ly before but was not aware of the tracking statistics feature. Which one between Tweetdeck and Hootsuite you think is better? I use Tweetdeck all the time and it does a lot of features of Hootsuite.

Thank you for sharing your wisdom.

Comment by Jami Jenkins, Details on September 29, 2009 at 5:31pm: To Picture My Wedding - MailChimp works well for my business. You might give it a test run. I was using iContact, but found MailChimp to offer more and, costs me less - free for what I do.

Comment by Genevieve E. Flynn on September 29, 2009 at 8:44pm: I would like to personally thank you for giving information, helpful information, pertaining to using Twitter. I frankly could not figure out how it would be beneficial to me and my business, but your information makes it a much more viable venue!!!!