A friend recently asked me how can you tell who clicked on the links that you shared in your tweets?

Bit.ly is great because it allows you to know how many time your links has been tweeted, shared on Facebook or on other platforms.

However, when you have 300 or 1,000+ followers, how can you tell who clicked on what?

I don’t know.

I think this type of  Twitter Analytics would be a very important feature that Twitter and other social media platforms can offer and monetize from. As a marketer, it is a great added value to know who clicked on my links and how often. Give me that info in a CSV and that is a great way for me to interact further with my community. I can tell who are my greatest fans or followers without having to make an educated guess on how many times a person has ReTweeted my message.

I see you coming… who cares? The most important is the engagement right? RTs are more important than the number of people who clicked on my links! Well… I disagree, especially when you have a massive following, identifying your enthusiasts is the best way to convert them into evangelists.

I believe evangelists are active fans of our brand and products. Enthusiasts are passive fans of our brand and product and should not be ignored.

By identifying who are our biggest enthusiasts, we can do a much better job in engaging with them. Moreover, with the advent of social media, corporations cannot direct all of their messages to their corporate presence. The importance is on providing value to our community. Therefore, we cannot track all our efforts on our website. It is as important to analyze how the collection of our messages are taken in by our community than the volume of traffic driven to our website.

I am much more interested to know how many people have clicked on our links and how often rather than how many times our links have been clicked or how many followers we have. It would be a great opportunity for us to measure our influence rather than going by the amount of followers (which can be very misleading and completely meaningless).

I have mentioned Twitter a lot but I believe the same is a necessity in Facebook. However, this can be an issue with their privacy policies (although this has not stopped them from leading their population where they want but I digress…). I don’t think we need to know who visited a page or profile and how many times but knowing who clicked on the published links and how often they clicked is crucial for effective Social Media Marketing.

I believe this is a great base on which Twitter can develop a monetizing model without having to use an advertising platform.

What do you think?

Thank you to @Anouknl for the blog post idea!

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Evan Williams, le co-fondateur et CEO de Twitter a dévoilé les plans futurs du chouchou des réseaux sociaux. La jeune entreprise va bientôt permettre aux gens à mieux filtrer leurs informations en introduisant des groupes générés par les utilisateurs. Twitter cherche aussi à mieux présenter les lieux d’où proviennent les “tweets” ainsi qu’à améliorer leur engin de recherche.

Evan Williams annonce aussi que Twitter se concentre à élever la crédibilité de son réseau en tant que source d’information en développant un système de réputation. Ce système sera basé sur la confiance attribuée par les membres du réseau. Williams explique qu’il est difficile de faire confiance à un inconnu mais que plus des gens font confiance à une personne, plus sa crédibilité augmente.

Est-ce que vous pensez que Twitter sera capable de développer un système de réputation respecté par les usagers?

photo par: magerleagues

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I have a lof ot respect for the work of Michelle Blanc, a local web strategist. However, one blog post really got on my nerves. Stating how size matters in social media.

My opinion has always been quality trumps quantity and Gary Vaynerchuk says it best.

I thought penis size competition was just for pubescent teens with low self-esteem anyway?

I personally am much more interested in the number of ReTweets a person can score on Twitter per day or the percentage of people that actually clicks on the links you share than the number of followers.

If we really want to compare size, according to http://www.epenis.nl,

• I (@alphonseha) score 36.7cm vs
• @michelleblanc’s 16.6cm

(14.5 vs 6.5in for my American readers ).

Michelle Blanc’s influence is much greater than mine and it frustrates me to see a person of such high authority in this industry blabber nonsense about social media. Especially in a time where corporations do not understand Social Media yet, the last thing we need is that they are having incorrect information fed to them.

It seems that everybody wants to go with the shotgun approach rather than the sniper approach. What the hell is target market? Segmentation? Those are all marketing 101. It still applies to Social Media. Hence the importance of having a social media marketing strategy that is based beyond x number of Facebook friends/fans or Twitter followers.

photo by: James Sarmiento

UPDATES (09-09-09): Michelle Blanc’s reply to my comment and my response to her (Apologies to my readers that do not read French).

Michelle Blanc:

@Alphonse, tu mêle les pommes et les oranges là. Il y a une différence entre 100 000 et 150 tout comme entre 300 et 3000. Le point du billet est que si tu as 150 Followers et que tu te présente comme gestionnaire médias sociaux pour une entreprise, il y a un problème. De même, si une entreprise est sur Twitter et qu’elle est suivie par 250 personnes, ça va être difficile de ne pas justifier la pub télé qui rejoint 1.5 millions de personnes. La grosseur n’est pas le seul critère il va de soi et Twitter est un outil pour rejoindre les influenceurs plutôt que les individus un à un. Mais il y a tout de même des chiffres qui se doivent d’y être et des résultats qui vont avec.

My Response:
Your post is not in a vacuum. I have enjoyed the quality of your blog posts, however with posts that boasts about “mensurations”, multiple times, your “subtlety” is quite questionable.

You said it yourself:

Vous me direz aussi que je prêche pour ma paroisse et que je profite encore une fois de l’opportunité de me vanter et de rappeler qu’Infopresse a déjà dit que j’avais les plus belles mensurations Web du Québec (et vous aurez raison).

I am simply pointing that out.

The position I take is that quality trumps quantity. Even if you have, as you state, 150 vs 100,000. It doesn’t matter. I still stand firm that quality trumps quantity and that is why I linked to Gary’s video.

You have discussed volume a lot here and I am talking about segmentation and target marketing. I am discussing that because you have not and I believe that is an important point to raise.

If you want to maintain your position that I posted BS I have no choice to believe that you are stating that my claims about the target market, market segmentation is BS as well.

I am raising the issues of the sniper approach as opposed to a blog post that blatantly glorifies volume (shotgun approach).

You can hint that I have personal phallic issues, that I cannot understand French properly, or that I just don’t “get” the subtleties of your blog post. If you do believe that we are talking about apples and oranges, which I do not, then I will say that in this case, you cannot glorify apples without raising the issue of oranges because it is misleading. One needs to be discussed with the other.

The power of social media is not in the volume or “mass reach” but in engagement and what I am saying is that blog posts such as this one contributes to the myth of the importance of volume in social media.

If you disagree then we shall have to agree to disagree.

Always a pleasure to have a conversation with you.
Have a nice day.

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I have been following NBA star Kevin Durant’s Twitter for a while. I must say, I think it is a good thing he tweets. He tweets like he breathes and that can get a little annoying, not all his tweets are interesting to me. In fact, he Tweets so much that I saw him respond to people complaining that he tweets too much. However, Twitter is a great time filler. Now that it is the NBA offseason, he often lets out his boredom.

The guy is 20 years old, so he is technically not old enough to hit the clubs and party with the booze. Twitter allows him to stay connected with his fans. He often ustream live, ask questions on Twitter like what music are you listening right now, etc.

This is a great thing because it keeps him busy, it keeps him away from trouble, unlike J.R. Smith for example.

As much as I don’t find him very interesting, Kevin “the god of basketball” Durant is very authentic and very down to earth, unlike make NBA players who aren’t even as good as him *cough* JR Smith *cough*. He is showing his true self to the world. Love him or hate him. Your choice. He’ll be fine with either. He will continue to share his #musicmondays, continue to be bored, ask what’s up with his fans, respond to them and continue to ustream. I just hope he keeps it up when he’ll be 25.

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I stumbled through the best article about Social Media for businesses and its ROI via a tweet from Lee Odden.

The article is written by Ronn Torossian, the CEO of 5WPR, one of the 25 largest public relations agencies in the U.S. and I think his comments hit home on a lot of point. It is a great reality check for most social media marketers.

Reality: CEOs are busy enough as they are and it is unrealistic to expect them to be able to tweet and engage with their following.

Yes, Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos did it but there are always exceptions to the rule. Many social media gurus like to use exceptions and make them the rule.

Torossian says that Twitter is wrongfully percecived. Twitter is not instant messenging like Google Chat, AIM or MSN Messenger. It is a mix of social and broadcast media. Which is very true and it is a reality that many SM marketers forget or ignore.

I had a discussion with Julien Smith about how can you engage with so many people on Twitter and truth be told: you cannot. It is humanly impossible to engage with thousands, nevermind 10 of thousands, or 100 of thousands and more.

This is not to say that you cannot use Social Media to monetize nor that you cannot use Social Media to engage with your customers, target market and clients. Torossain discusses how there will be a business etiquette that will be different from user etiquette in social media and I agree. Social Media is still very young. In my opinion, it is in an embryonic phase – we will see a lot of stride in social media and social media marketing. Over time, people will be more comfortable and will learn to manage their expectations. Twitter and Facebook are still very new and are thus exciting. Let’s just give it time.

Meanwhile, brands and CEOs can still use Twitter to influence. As Torossian puts it perfectly:

When launched, Twitter was hailed as a microblogging site, a way in which individuals and/or thought leaders could share information with their followers, as opposed to the way in which it is mainly used today, as an instant-messaging service.

CEOs do not have time to reply on Twitter, but they can share information. If they read a great article they like, they can share with their following. They can take 5 minutes a day to peruse their twitterfeed and try to retweet once a day. Their level of engagement is just different. Retweeting is a form of engagement, sharing quality information is another form of engagement.

In an economy starved for lead generation, as long as they do not only push their own content, CEOs can definitely use Twitter to influence and demonstrate expertise. Expecting them to reply to every comments, however is ludicrous.

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I know there are Twitter directories but they are all so awful and hard to find so I figured I would make a interesting lists of people on Twitter (They are listed in alphabetical order by first name). If I am missing any NBA players from my list please send me a tweet: http://twitter.com/alphonseha!

Tip: press control+F or Apple+F (if you use a mac) and type your favorite Basketball player to find him quickly.

List of NBA players on Twitter

• Allen Iverson: http://twitter.com/alleniverson
• Amar’e Stoudemire: http://twitter.com/amareisreal
• Andrew Bogut: http://twitter.com/AndrewMBogut
• Baron Davis: http://twitter.com/baron_davis
• Bobby Brown: http://twitter.com/BBROWNsix
• Brian Cardinal: http://twitter.com/Cardinal_Brian
• Charlie Villanueva: http://twitter.com/CV31
• Chris Andersen: http://twitter.com/BirdmanAndersen
• Chris Bosh: http://twitter.com/chrisbosh
• Chris Douglas Roberts: http://twitter.com/cdouglasroberts
• Chris Paul: http://twitter.com/OneandonlyCP3
• Daequan Cook: http://twitter.com/Dcook14
• Danny Granger: http://twitter.com/dgranger33
• Derek Fisher: http://twitter.com/derekfisher
• Deron Williams: http://twitter.com/D_Will_8_4real
• Devin Harris: http://twitter.com/devin34harris
• Donte Greene: http://twitter.com/DonteGreene
• Dorell Wright: http://twitter.com/DWRIGHTWAY
• Dwyane Wade: http://twitter.com/dwadeofficial
• Dwight Howard: http://twitter.com/dwighthoward
• Fabricio Oberto: http://twitter.com/obricio7
• Francisco Garcia: http://twitter.com/cisco32
• Jarrett Jack: http://twitter.com/Jarrettjack03
• Jason Richardson: http://twitter.com/jrich23
• Jason Thompson: http://twitter.com/jtthekid
• Jermaine O’Neal: http://twitter.com/jermaineoneal
• Joe Alexander: http://twitter.com/seejoedunk
• Julian Wright: http://twitter.com/jujubee32
• Kevin Durant: http://twitter.com/KevinDurant35
• Kevin Love: http://twitter.com/kevin_love
• Mark Madsen: http://twitter.com/madsen_mark
• Mario Chalmers: http://twitter.com/mister6clutch
• Michael Beasley: http://twitter.com/supercoolbeas
• Mo Williams: http://twitter.com/mogotti2
• Morris Peterson: http://twitter.com/mopete24
• Paul Pierce: http://twitter.com/paulpierce34
• Randy Foye: http://twitter.com/randyfoye
• Rasual Butler: http://twitter.com/RasualButler45
• Ron Artest: http://twitter.com/96TruwarierQB
• Royal Ivey: http://twitter.com/ROYEAZEE
• Sasha Vujacic: http://twitter.com/sashavujacic
• Shaquille O’Neal: http://twitter.com/THE_REAL_SHAQ
• Shawn Marion: http://twitter.com/Matrix31
• Steve Nash: http://twitter.com/The_real_Nash
• TJ Ford: http://twitter.com/tj_ford
• Travis Outlaw: http://twitter.com/travis25Outlaw
• Troy Murphy: http://twitter.com/troy_murphy
• Tyrus Thomas: http://twitter.com/t_time24
• Tyson Chandler: http://twitter.com/tysonchandler

List of former NBA players on Twitter

• Dennis Rodman: http://twitter.com/DennisRodman
• Jalen Rose: http://twitter.com/jalenrose
• Stephon Marbury: http://twitter.com/StarburyMarbury

I am also thinking of doing a list of Porn Stars on Twitter… that could be interesting

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I have been using Twitter for over a year now. In fact, my first tweet was June 11, 2008. I haven’t been using it for as long as many web marketing early adopters, but I am among the first in my offline social circle and considering that it has been launched publicly in July 2006, I have been using it for the 1/3 of Twitter existence.

I decided to write this post because I see more and more friends in the communications and/or marketing industry sign up on Twitter and are obviously clueless about how it can benefit them. People are asking me more and more what is the point of Twitter so I think it would be good to have a blog post where I can send people for more information.

What is Twitter?

Twitter is a micro-blogging and social networking tool. Similar to blogging, it allows any of its members to publish whatever they wish. However, every posts or “tweets” must be 140 characters or less. Why 140 characters? Dom, one of many who helped create Twitter explained that Jack Dorsey, the creator of Twitter, wanted to have a dispatch service that connects us on our phone using text. Something that would allow a person to contact many people at once in a brief and concise manner. Hence the reason why Twitter asks you to answer the question:

What are you doing?

Keep in mind that this was in 2006, thus smart phones were not as rampant as they are today. Just to give you an idea, the iPhone was released in June 2007.

What does Twitter mean for me?

To be informed instantly and to inform multiple people at once. Ashton Kutcher for example, can currently inform 2,85 million people in less than 30 seconds (Also, on an SEO note, with all the publicity he received, imagine all the inbound links he has to his profile page. Guess what the Page Rank is … 4!). In terms of traffic, that means that Ashton Kutcher can potentially send 2,85 million visitors to one web page of his choice by just publishing a link in his tweet. I wonder how many dollars is his tweet worth? We all know that not all 2,85 million people read his tweets but his reach is still phenomenal. The same is true for us. The more followers we have, the more influent we become and the more traffic we can send to the web page of our choice. Rather than paying PPC ads, I still don’t understand why online publishing companies such as Canoe.ca, MSN Sympatico or Cyberpresse do not develop relationships with power users to send them traffic. Pay them for a tweet, your revenues are in CPM anyway!

On a personal level, Twitter helps people come closer. It allows people to stay connected.

Twitter as Marketing Research

About 6 to 9 months ago, I was reluctant about talking about Summize (now Twitter Search) because it was such a powerful tool. Now, I’m still confused as to why people don’t seem to use it. Twitter search allows you to see in real time what people are saying. You want to know what people are saying about Blackberry? Twitter Search. Is the new Harry Potter worth watching? Twitter Search. Bing now integrates real time search results via Twitter? Twitter Search! What ever news or information you want to get, you can get very good information thanks to Twitter Search. You can even find job seekers on twitter!

The important thing is to know what to search for. Don’t just search for keywords. Think about your target audience and try what they are most likely to say/tweet. An industry colleague of mine works for a promotional company and was looking for promo agents. Rather than typing “promo agents”, she can try to search for outgoing, social people and perhaps students. Outgoing and social people are more likely to tweet about going out or partying rather than tweeting about going to the movies. She can also try to make a search for her competitor’s name and offer their agents a promo contract.

How to Use Twitter Efficiently

Here is my Twitter 101 in two words: Listen and Engage! I cannot stress this enough. This post is meant as an introduction to Twitter or “Twitter for beginners”. I will create an archive of all Twitter related posts so you can read more advance ways to using Twitter. Rather than talking, talking, talking (or in this case, tweeting, tweeting, tweeting…), listen! Make a Twitter Search, find key Twitterers to follow and read their Twitter posts. If you don’t find them relevant, unfollow them. Don’t worry, it isn’t like Facebook. Twitter is much more volatile than Facebook, therefore if you unfollow them, it isn’t as dramatic as when you unfriend somebody on Facebook. Reply to other people tweets, ReTweet somebody else’s post. That is the best way of integrating yourself. Twitter is also a social-networking tool. In order to develop a strong following, you have to create relationships and just as in real life, hanging around somebody that talks all the time is very annoying. Twitter is the same. Once you develop concrete relationships on Twitter, then you can go on to the next stage. Twitter is about relationships and conversation.

Twitter as part of your Marketing Strategy

Twitter is a tool like any other communication outlet ie: advertising, telemarketing, direct marketing. I cannot tell you how to use it. There are many ways to use Twitter. I can only give you example. Like in any marketing strategy; analyzing, planning and setting objectives are important. Twitter cannot be your only strategy. It can only be part of your overall marketing strategy whether it is a web marketing or social media marketing strategy.

If you are interested in integrating Twitter in your marketing strategy or are interested to know how Twitter can help your business just send me a tweet!

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Why is this a big deal? It is a big deal because Bell initially imposed a 15 cents fee for each tweets sent AND received. Thankfully, 2 days later, outraged by Canadians, Bell folded and did not charge extra fees for tweets.

I am glad that Rogers and Fido did not go the greedy route and decided to charge extra for tweets. Finally, somehwat good news from the Canadian Personal Cellular Service industry.

What this means for social media?
Twitter is at its most effective when it is instant. I have an iPhone thus I can check on my tweets on my phone. However, I cannot be instantly notified. I can get my tweets hours later and miss out on a friend who was just a couple of blocks away from me. This is also a major milestone for Twitter penetration in Canada. Twitter is very useful for sharing information if you are on a computer but Twitter is a great way of connecting people both online and offline and that is only efficient when we can get instant notifications of the people I want.

It was a pleasant surprised today at lunch when I started receiving my friend’s tweet. The next step for Twitter to take over Quebec is to translate its service to French.

UPDATES:

Canada gets Fully Twitterized. Twitter announced on their blog on May 11th 2009 that Telus, Virgin Mobile and Koodo Mobile users can now Tweet and receive Tweets. Twitter reassures the users that they will not be charged extra fees for their Tweeting activities.

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