There has been a lot of talk about how to track the success of marketing activity on Twitter, with a focus on the number of followers that an individual is able to collect. On the surface, this seems to make sense – after all, this is the yardstick we typically use to measure reach and success in many general advertising channels, including magazine circulation, TV viewers, online banner impressions, list size, etc. I would venture that this is perhaps an overly simplistic view of the channel (yes, folks, I do believe it is a channel), and that a deeper analysis of the way people are interacting with your tweets can yield a clearer insight as to how much value is derived by both parties.

As with other one-to-one channels, especially email, the most important metrics to pay attention to depend on the ultimate goal of your message. Do you want them to click, to reply, to take action? Much like Twitter as a whole, what you get out of it depends on what you put in, and what your goals are. With this in mind, I propose a few common-sense, non-scientific metrics to get the conversation started:

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To measure engagement:
The Retweet Ratio

# of Retweets/Total # of Tweets

The Retweet Ratio can give you a simple view of how compelling or useful your followers perceive your content to be, i.e. whether it is ‘RT-worthy’ – 1 being super-useful, and 0 meaning it’s not interesting enough to pass along. Such a metric could be a simple measure of content quality, as well as follower engagement. A recent study has shown there are ways to improve this ratio, by simply adjusting the content, or wording of your tweets.

Reply Ratio

# of Replies/Total # of Tweets

How often does an individual’s content provoke a response? While the actual content of these replies is likely a better indicator of true engagement, this metric could be useful for identifying the best people to reach out to, in order to conduct, say, qualitative consumer research on Twitter.

Twinfluence compares your reach, quality of followers, and other stats against other Twitterers. Think you can take on @aplusk, or @barackobama?

To measure reach:

Effective Reach

# of Followers x (1 + Retweet Ratio)           

Retweeting has the effect of amplifying the number of people you can reach on Twitter – think ripples extending from a pebble dropped in a pond. Therefore, the higher your Retweet Ratio, the greater your effective reach will be, especially if your followers have sizeable audiences of their own. Twinfluence has a robust tool that takes this approach above and beyond, to serve as a great measure of an individual’s influence on Twitter.

Bonus measurement idea:

Tagging URLs

Think about putting some kind of identifying clicktags (e.g. DoubleClick) on any URLs that drive to pages/sites under your control prior to shrinking them. Although it’ll slow down the amount of tweets you’re able to put out, you’ll at least know (by looking in your analytics package of choice) which particular messages are generating traffic more than others, and use those learnings to refine your style and drive more traffic.

What do you think? Do you have an ideas of how to measure Twitter activity in a meaningful way for marketers? Let us know in the comments!