Twitter was the story of 2009, growing from less than 5 million monthly users to almost 30 million in the course of six months.  People joined, brands rushed in, and words like “Tweet” entered our common vocabulary. 

It was a heady year for Twitter, but has it had its day in the sun?  What do the headlines mean?

First of all, Twitter isn’t going anywhere any time soon.  It’s become ingrained into consumers’ and companies’ communication channels.   And it’s just getting started—under development are more tools to help enterprise customers manage and learn from the billions of tweets produced globally.

Secondly, who said Twitter is for everyone?  It serves a great purpose for many people, but it lacks Facebook’s wide range of applications (and thus wide appeal).  It also lacks a great deal of the noise that many find makes Facebook a less than ideal business networking, news, and sharing environment. 

Lastly (and most importantly) is what the headlines are not conveying.  Yes, overall growth is slowing—how could it not after posting 1,000%-plus growth in such a short time?–but the key for marketers is not the number of Twitterers but the habits, Technographics and psychographics of Twitterers.  As Sean Corcoran and Josh Bernoff demonstrated in their December 2009 report, “Who Flocks To Twitter?,” Twitters are the connected of the connected, overindexing at all Social Media habits.  For example, Twitterers are three times more likely to be Creators (people who create and share content via blog posts and YouTube) as the general US population. 

Twitter’s growth may slow (or perhaps it will see an @oprah-like bounce now that @billgates has joined and is generating PR), but its value to those who Twitter and to marketers is not in question into the very foreseeable future. 

As a Forrester analyst I get to work with a fantastic team of researchers – including Tom Cummings, who contributes some great work to our research on social media marketing and a wide range of other topics. Below, Tom discusses a piece of research we collaborated on, covering how marketers are using Twitter:

[Posted by Tom Cummings.]

We recently published WebTrack review of how major companies are using Twitter. Over a span of three days in
October, we tracked 30 marketers on Twitter to see how they named and branded
their accounts, how often they tweeted, how they interacted with other
Twitter users, and more. We didn't just study the most popular accounts on Twitter –
instead, we looked for a broad sample of accounts across key industries (including retail, travel, financial services, auto, and CPG).

For the most part, brands get the basics right. 
The large majority interact with followers (more than three-quarters of the brands we tracked reply and retweet). And most fill their streams with a steady flow of relevant content (80% tweet at least daily). We especially liked seeing companies go beyond traditional marketing messages – like when State Farm promotes fire alarm safety or when Ford gives behind-the-scenes perspective on their new engineering processes.

But while most get the basics right, many branded Twitter accounts still fall short
on some key points.  For instance, it’s surprisingly difficult to
find the appropriate account for many brands.  Neither Google nor Twitter search offer an ideal way to find a company's official account – and often, a company's official primary account isn't the most active or the most followed.

We were also surprised that only half of the accounts we
reviewed “validate” their Twitter page.  It's not enough to link from a Twitter account to a corporate page – those corporate pages must also link back to
the account to prove that the account is official.

We like how Whole Foods – which runs more than 100 official accounts – handles both of these problems: They keep their primary account name simple and searchable (@WholeFoods) and link from that account to a list of all their other accounts. Other marketers should follow suit – because it’s up to them to prove the authenticity of their account
(no matter how many followers they have) and to make it easy for fans to find the right account to follow.

Clients can read more examples and findings in the full report. In the meantime, we’d love to hear how your brand is using Twitter, how you let
fans know about the account, and what other tips you have for best leveraging the power of Twitter.

I’ve spent the last year living and working in Vancouver, Canada — speaking with many Canadian interactive marketers and agencies, and collecting survey data on Canadian consumers — so I’m pleased to say that yesterday we released a new report, Canadian Social Technographics Revealed, and added our latest Canadian data to our free Social Technographics Profile Tool.

In researching this report, I learned that:

• Canadians are the most active social networkers in any market we survey. In our Social Technographics Ladder, we refer to those who regularly use social networks as ‘joiners.’ And Canada boasts a higher percentage of joiners than any of the other 12 countries we regularly survey: 57% of Canadians told us they use social networks at least once each month. (The next strongest social networking market is the US, where 51% are joiners.) Canada also has more ‘creators,’ critics,’ and ‘spectators’ than many other countries. [An edit to avoid confusion: while Canadians are the strongest adopters of social networks we've found in our surveys, they are not the strongest users of social media overall (which would include not just social networks but also blogs and other social platforms) -- that would be the South Koreans.]
• Many Canadian marketers have been using social media for years. With all those socially engaged consumers, it’s no surprise Canadian marketers have been pretty aggressive in adopting social media too. The report includes several great examples of marketers successfully using social media, and I found that some of the most innovative marketers (like Vancity and Molson) have been leveraging social media for 3 or 4 years now.

One of my favorite examples of social media marketing in Canada comes from the political realm. NDP leader Jack Layton recognized that his followers were among the most socially engaged in Canada, as you’ll see below. So he used Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to energize NDP voters before the 2008 federal election — and that helped the party gain 31% more seats in Ottawa than they’d had in the previous government.

Go and have a play with our Social Technographics Profile Tool and you can find free cuts of this data by age and gender. (Clients can also ask us to cut the data by other factors, like where people bank, which mobile carrier they use, or what province they live in.)

And if you’ve got any other great examples of social media marketing in Canada, let us know in the comments below.

Yesterday we published a case study that I’m really excited about, covering how the NHL used tweet-ups to create excitement for the 2009 Stanley Cup playoffs. The league worked with fans to organize a series of events that took place simultaneously around the world on the opening night of the playoffs. I had a chance to attend the tweet-up in Vancouver, and thought they were a great example of the power of both online and offline influence.

In the weeks leading up to the playoffs, fans started talking online about organizing a series of playoff tweet-ups — and the league’s Director of Social Media Mike DiLorenzo jumped at the chance to make it happen. Mike planned a big tweet-up in New York on the opening night of the playoffs, complete with food and beer sponsors and hockey merchandise giveaways — and started promoting the event on Twitter.

To make sure there were lots of tweet-ups happening around the league, Mike reached out to a handful of influential hockey fans in key NHL markets to recruit their participation. Lots of fans also stepped up and volunteered to host events in their cities too. Before long, there were tweet-ups organized in almost two dozen cities around the world. The league supported every one of those tweet-ups by sending gift bags, coupons for discounts at shop.NHL.com, and signed hockey merchandise for event organizers to raffle.

The NHL spent only a few weeks and a few thousand dollars planning and supporting the tweet-ups, but the results were fantastic:

• Big in-person attendance. More than 1200 people attended tweet-ups in 23 cities (including events in New Zealand and Northern Ireland) for the opening night of the playoffs. Many fans organized further tweet-ups as their teams progressed through the playoffs as well
• Bigger online chatter. Those attendees talked a lot about the events on Twitter: On the opening night of the playoffs, the term "NHL" was mentioned on Twitter more than twice as often as on a normal day. And #NHLtweetup became a trending topic for the day.
• Enormous total reach. According to the league’s research, as many as 240,000 people could have heard about the event on Twitter. And the tweet-ups also generated press coverage that reached millions, including a story in USA Today. 

So, what can other marketers learn from the NHL’s success? We think there are a number of important lessons here:

1. Get your brand advocates involved. The NHL wouldn’t have been as successful without fan participation. The fans helped develop the idea, and they did all the legwork for the local events — including finding venues and promoting the events. If the NHL had tried to organize these events itself, it would’ve cost a lot more money, and probably wouldn’t have worked nearly as well.
2. Give yourself enough lead time. The NHL and its tweet-up hosts had only three weeks to organize these events — and it was a pretty hectic three weeks. The league plans to organize more tweet-ups this season, and will start planning each six to eight weeks in advance. 
3. Make sure PR is part of your strategy. The fans who attended the tweet-ups generated a lot of excitement about the playoffs — both at the events, and on Twitter. But the mainstream press coverage provided a ton of reach. The media is still in love with Twitter, so inviting them to the events can really pay off.

There’s some other great coverage of the event online — including that at Goaliegirl.com — and clients should read the entire case study for even more details and best practices. Congratulations to the NHL, and to all its tweet-up organizers, on a great event.

Marketers don’t think they’re very good at measuring social media. 
When my colleague Emily Riley asked marketers to
rate their ability to measure the impact of their social media
initiatives, the average grade they gave themselves was 4.5 out of 10.
Not a great score — especially given that accountability is one of the
key selling points of interactive marketing. So I’ve spent a lot of
time this year trying to understand why marketers aren’t good at
measuring social media — and how they can do better.

The fact is, social media marketers are drowning in a sea of
metrics. Every social platform and vendor offers its own metrics, and
there are literally hundreds of ways to measure the success of social
initiatives. With so many numbers to choose from, and so little insight
into which metrics are important, it’s not surprising that marketers
feel overwhelmed.

Most marketers fixate on easily-available measures like followers or
fans — regardless of whether those metrics are important. Many others
fail to measure obviously useful numbers just because they’re not on the first page of a report. A marketer focused on talking [video] should have a radically different definition of success than one focused on embracing
[video]. But marketers are much more likely to tailor their social
media measurement to the tools they’re using than to the objectives
they’re trying to achieve. Have a look — most marketers measure pretty
much the same metrics, no matter what their objective:

It’s
obvious that marketers need more clarity into which social media
metrics they should be tracking. So we’ve developed a simple three-step
process to help marketers better tailor their measurement strategies to
the objectives they’re pursuing. Walking through these three steps will
help you cut through the clutter on your marketing reports and measure
your social media initiatives more effectively:

• Step 1: Think back to your marketing objective. Go back and
  find your notes from when you were first planning your social marketing
  effort — and remind yourself of the objective you were pursuing. If
  you don’t know what your goal was, you’ll never know what you should be
  measuring, or if you succeeded.
• Step 2: Consider what types of metrics signal success. Don’t think about specific lines on a report yet — instead, think
  about what types of consumer behaviors and sentiments match your
  objectives, and focus your measurement on those categories of metrics.
  If your goal was energizing, success is defined as lots of people
  saying positive things about your brand; if your goal was supporting,
  you want to know if users were providing good advice to each other –
  and whether it kept users from having to ask you for support directly.  Again, this isn’t about specific metrics, it’s about how
  you hoped your social initiative would change your relationship with
  consumers.
• Step 3: Look for that category of metric in the social technology you’re using.
  Once you’ve identified the type of metric that will signal success,
  then you can look for ways to track those metrics within the social
  platform you’re using. This is when you should get into the specifics
  of which lines on the report Facebook or Jive gives you are most
  important — and which other vendors you need to use to find the exact
  numbers you’re looking for.

In my new report, ‘Three Steps To Measuring Social Media Marketing,’
I offer a framework that helps marketers place social
media metrics into one of six categories, shows them which categories of
metrics should be used to measure which objectives, and gives examples
of how to obtain those metrics from each social platform. I hope
clients use my framework; I think it will make their lives easier and
their measurement more successful.

But the key message of that report (and this blog post) isn’t the
framework, it’s this call to action: We as an industry must do better
at measuring social media marketing. Social media budgets keep rising,
but that trend won’t continue forever if we can’t prove that social
initiatives are effective. Perhaps more important, if we don’t know
which social applications succeeded and which didn’t, we can’t learn
from our experiences and improve on future efforts. And it’s
surprisingly easy to measure social media effectively: we just need to
focus on measuring objectives rather than technologies.

Whether you use the detailed framework in my report, or simply keep
these three steps in mind as you design your own measurement strategy,
I hope these ideas help you sift through all the social media metrics
that are available, and find the right ones to measure your efforts.