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Hashtags (keywords that follow #) are a great way to jump to topic and join the conversation on twitter. Below I have complied a list of 25 commonly used hashtags by Digital Marketing and Analytics community that you might want to track as well. Follow me on @anilbatra #measure #msure #bigdata #analytics #insights #data #emetrics #trend #reports #segmentation #segment #seo #search #ppcchat #cro #landingpages #webdesign #custexp #mktg #marketing #ecom #ecommerce #ecomchat #ux #smdata Other tags that were provided by the readers of this blog #attribution   Let me know if I missed any. Follow me on at @anilbatra Other Twitter Posts: Best Time to Tweet? Twitter Analytics 3 KPIs for Measuring Twitter Success All of my posts on Twitter Analytics Jobs Marketing Analyst – Mobile (Zappos.com) Henderson, NV – Zappos.com Inc. Or ITS Affiliates Senior Web Analyst Las Vegas, NV – Zappos.com Inc. Or ITS Affiliates Books that I am reading or have read recently You Should Test That: Convers...

Picture from CNET.com Twitter has grown leaps and bound in last 4 years and now has over 190 Million members worldwide. Many companies have now jumped into using twitter as a means to provide customer support. Why? Well because more and more people are getting on twitter and it is way less expensive then phone support. Recently I turned to twitter for help with one my services. There were two main reasons for me to turn to twitter 1. publicly complain about the company because I was not happy with the service and phone customer support 2. I was hoping that someone at the company will pay attention and get back to me. I achieved both. I was pleasantly surprised to find that these guys were paying attention and immediately responded. So how was my experience? Well not much better than phone support. Though the twitter support agent tried her best but she was limited by the process and to some extent the technology. I think twitter could be a great customer support tool. However, we ha...

Every day I come across some scheme telling me how I can gain more twitter followers. Many so "Twitter experts" talk and write all day long about how to get more twitter followers. But how do you know if you have (or are gaining) the right kind of followers? Some of your follower constantly engage with you and you probably know who they are. But what about the rest of them? Who are they? What do they do? Are they the right audience for you? How can you create a right message to get their attention? Understanding your Followers One way to understand your followers is to look at their twitter bios and analyze the stuff they are tweeting about. This will help you gain understanding of their motivations. But all this is not trivial, so I started looking for a tool that will help me do this. Well, I had partial success and found a tool called TwitterSheep . TwitterSheep allows you to build a tag cloud based the bios of your followers on twitter. However it does not al...

Do you know what the best time to tweet is? Recently a client asked me this question and I am sure there are a lot of you wondering the same thing. When you tweet you want to make sure it reaches a lot of people (can I say that you want to get the biggest chirp for the tweet?). So I did some research to find out what other have to say and here is what I found According to Gary McCaffry , based on the traffic to his site from twitter, the best time to tweet is anywhere between 9 AM – 3 PM PST. Another blogger, Malcolm Coles , who surveyed 120 twitter users to find out the best time time to tweet,, says that the best time to tweet is 4:01 PM. Social Media Guide says that best time to tweet is 9:00 AM PST, this will allow you to hit people across the globe Fasctompany says that the best time to get Retweeted is 4:00 PM EST. Fast company also lists many other factors that can help in Retweets. According to techandlife.com , if you have a large international following then you shoul...

This post is the second part of my post on “3 KPIs for Measuring Twitter”. In the first part, I wrote that one of the KPIs for measuring Twitter is the Percent Visit Rate (%VR). %VR measures what percent of your followers click on your link to visit your site. KPI: % Visit Rate = (Visits/Followers)*100)) Measuring VR the wrong way Referring Sites/Domains Report Late last year I did a small survey to understand how people measure the success of the links they post on Twitter. I found out that most of the people rely on “Referring Sites/Domains” report in their web analytics tool to see the traffic they get from Twitter. This seems like a great approach but there are two problems with this: Twitter.com is not the only way to access Twitter. A lot of people use 3rd party tools like Tweetdeck to access Twitter. A click on a link from such a tool won’t show up in the “Referring Sites/Domains” reports in the web analytics tool, it will be listed as “Direct Traffic” or “No referrer”. You can...

How do you measure if you are being effective on Twitter or not? In my opinion it really comes down to measuring if anybody is paying attention to what you are saying or not, everything else follows. If you can measure the true impact on the bottom line then you are way ahead of a lot of people on Twitter. Congratulations to you!!! However, not everybody is yet in a position to measure at that level. This post is about metrics that you can measure on daily basis even when you don’t know the final impact on the bottom line. Key actions as a result of your Tweets As I said above, your success on Twitter comes down to one thing: Is Anybody paying attention to what you are saying on twitter? If people are paying attention to what you are saying then one or more of the following will immediately happen: Retweets @[twitter username] replies Visits from the links posted in your tweets Let’s look at each of these measures Retweets When some Retweets your message, their followers see you...

I am sure that you all have heard about Twitter and many of you have a Twitter account. But do you think all the twittering is worth the effort? I have designed two Surveys to understand how people measure the success on Twitter. I will make the results available on this blog and also Tweet about it ( @anilbatra ) Survey 1: The intent of this short survey is to understand if and how people track URLs they post on Twitter. http://batraonlinetwitter.questionpro.com/ Survey 2: The intent of this survey is to understand the Click-Through Rate on Twitter URLs http://www.questionpro.com/akira/TakeSurvey?id=1289844 If you can please twitter about this survey or post it on your blog that will be a great help. Tweet This Comments? Questions? ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Looking to fill your Web Analytics or Online Marketing position? Post your open jobs on http://www.web-analytics-jobs.com/ ---------------------------------------------------------...

Recently WebTrends blogged that Twitter search will now be listed in the standard search engine and keywords report in WebTrends. Omniture has also blogged about integrating Twitter search data into Site Catalyst. As Twitter increasingly becomes a tool that people use to find information it is really critical for companies to know how people are finding their sites on Twitter. Doing so will allow them to incorporate that learning into future marketing efforts on Twitter as well as other sources (e.g. Google etc). Since Google Analytics does not yet recognize Twitter search as a search engine like WebTrends or Ominiture does, I will show you how you can do it easily with one line of code. However, keep in mind this solution only works when the search originates on Twitter (i.e. http://search.twitter.com ). 3rd party tools like TweetDeck, those will not be captured in this solution (nor will it, I believe, be captured in WebTrends’ solution). Use this information to understand general...

Twitter has become a tool that I have come to love . It has provided me a way to connect with people I have never met, and it has helped me find information that I might have missed otherwise. A recent experience on Twitter showed me how this tool can be used to gather customer feedback and also to collaborate with others to solve a problem. Last week I wrote a small tool to help me create short url’s with Google Analytics Tracking embedded in them . This tool allows me to create short URLs for links that are both external (not residing on my site) as well as internal (residing on my site). The tool is open to the public so please give it and try and send me your feedback. It is nothing fancy but something that I needed for my own use. (More on this in another blog post). (Also see, Twitter Analytics and Google Analytics Twitter URL Builder ) At 11:04 p.m. on February 5th I tweeted about this tool. Within minutes I got my first feedback in a direct message (also called “DM” in twitter...

Last week I wrote a blog on Twitter Analytics . In this post I am going to talk about a ReTweet, a Twitter action and a KPI that I mentioned in my previous blog posts on Twitter . ReTweet is when someone takes your tweet (a post on twitter) and tweets it again so that his/her followers can read it too. ReTweet is where the true power of a network like Twitter emerges. For example if you have a network of 1000 followers then you are only reaching 1000 people. But if those 1000 (or subset of them) people take your message and ReTweet it so that it is broadcasted to their followers that’s when the message begins to extend beyond its original reach. If the message is compelling then it will be ReTweeted by your followers and their followers and their followers and it will go on. ReTweet Best Practices How to ReTweet You like a tweet and decide to send it your followers. You generally do it using RT, R/T, ReTweet followed by a blank space, the symbol @ and the username of the person who twe...

There is a lot of discussion recently about how to measure authority, influence etc. on Twitter . There are a lot of tools popping up which claim to give some kind of score to help you measure you (or anyone else) against everybody else. This post is not about those tools and which ones I like (more on that later). This post is about things that we can track for sure. There are millions of Twitter users who are tweeting every day, hoping and assuming that there tweets are being read by their followers. We can’t track all tweets and find out if they are being read but if you are one of those who post a link in your tweets then you are in luck. This post will show you how to track URLs posted in your tweets so that you can determine for sure if anybody is reading those tweets and also what kind of tweets from you are getting the most attention. There are two types of URLs you post in Twitter URL to your site URLs to third party sites URLs to you site – When you post a link to your site o...

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users' updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length. I heard about Twitter from few friends of mine who could not stop raving about it. After initial skepticism about how useful it would be, I joined the bandwagon and started twittering (Micro blogging on Twitter is called Twittering). I post about 1 tweet (post) per day on Twitter. There are some people who tweet all day long (I’m not sure if they do anything else). From my experience so far I can tell you that it is a pretty good tool to learn things you normally would miss, things that you care about. There are a number of people in the Web Analytics, Online Marketing and Advertising space that I follow and I’m always adding more people to follow. Following someone can provide you insight into what they are up to, what are the cool things they read or have come across,...