Have you heard the term “vanity metrics”? Vanity metrics are about SIZE. The bigger the better—more Twitter followers, etc. We need to challenge ourselves to think beyond them: How many followers do I have? How many times was a hashtag used? These are critical inputs into ROI — return on interesting.
However, they are not the best business or demand generation metrics. Our job with social media and demand generation is to find a way to put ourselves in front of the customer’s buying journey with pull messaging. AND, craft a call-to-action that incites a response to take a step toward learning more — about content, about a white paper, or about an event.
4 Things We Know About Social Media Clicks
1. Registration Pages
You affect lead and demand generation with clicks-to-registration, clicks-to-site, etc. for both B2B and B2C. However, in B2B and B2C the registration page has to work as hard as possible to convert! You can set yourself up for success by aligning your content to connect with the customer. The more the connection … the more clicks-to-registration.
2. Engagement
Customers differ in their social media consumption and engagement. B2B and B2C target audiences differ in the way they engage with social media. Some retweet and repost, while others click through, while others just lurk until they feel comfortable to take the next steps—on their terms.
3. More Followers Do Not Mean More Action
More followers does not necessarily translate into more action … but better messaging does. Clicks, clicks per tweets and retweets are the best way to measure engagement to ensure content interaction aligns with your goals. Better messaging will drive better activity.
4. Customer Centricity
Timing and customer-centricity matter when looking to drive customer engagement and the desired reaction. You need to consider when you deliver your message and if they mean more to you or the customer.
Each of us need to work very hard with putting a certain rigor and approach to our process of putting together a messaging strategy for each marketing campaign: thought-leadership content curation, strategic events and webinars. I wanted to share 10 things that we have proven to work (or believe in enough to test!)
10 Social Media Tips to Get More Twitter Clicks
Click Tip #1: Use different Twitter headlines to inspire clicks
I’ve found that the headline approach to a selection of your daily tweets will help your tweets to break through the Twitter (Twitter Clutter). For example:
- Direct Headlines: “Free #Mobility E-book For All Followers”
- News Headline: “My Exclusive Interview With Godfather of #BI @HowardDresnan”
- How-to Headline: ”How To Use Visual #CustomerService To Decrease Costs”
- Question Headline: ”Do You Still Use #Excel For #MarketingPlanning?”
- The Command Headline: “Get Your #SocialMediaQuestions Answered Today!”
- Reason Why Headline: “5 Ways To Use #Evernote”
Click Tip #2: Mix The Style Of Your Tweets
Too many tweeters have one style of messaging – just RTing, being very promotional, having the same tone, etc. I’ve seen it all and much of it is all of the same. Mix it up to keep your followers interesting by mixing traffic-grabbing tweets (i.e. the headlines) with the regular conversational tweets.
Click Tip #3: Front-load your tweets with key information
50% of your followers and hashtag searchers are on a mobile device, so placing you’re the key point to your message in the first 20-30 characters will maximize your exposure on a mobile device. Also, the front-placement of the facts will help Google work harder to find you. Ultimately, this placement could potentially make for brake the decision for a visitor to pass … or click on the Tweet
Click Tip #4: Use the right hashtag!
This is the number-one bad move of most B2B and B2C tweeters – great intention with bad execution. I best-practice check every social media campaign to ensure we include 2-3 non-brand hashtags. Better hashtags mean better reach. It’s a numbers game to inspire the right customers and prospects to click through to your content.The more people who see your tweets mean the more people will click through to your content. By using 3 customer-centric, non-brand hashtags in each tweet, you leverage and maximize the customer native behavior continuum – from search to click.
Click Tip #5: Keep your tweets to 100-120 characters
A HubSpot survey identifies that 120 characters are the sweet-spot to drive the most clicks. In NA, we have also found that this character count drives the most retweets too—since it leaves room to tweet
Click Tip #6: Place your links ¼ into the tweet
A HubSpot study shows the clicks placed 25% into the message drives the most clicks. For example, you tweet would look something like. “Catch the webinar in progress now! http://spr.ly/6013rNNT Running BW on #HANA prepares you for #BigData. #database#analytics#inmemory “
Click Tip #7: Keep your tweets to 1 per hour
My experience shows that tweets that contain clicks to registration or click to content, shows that 12 per day is a sweet spot to drive clicks, retweets, and follower growth.
Click Tip #8: Include key action words to direct desired activity
Customers, at times, need be told what to do, even in a pull (pull/push) environment. For instance, using words like Via, @, Please, RT, and Check drive the most click-through activity. In fact, Please RT! Is our best-performing tweet inclusion to drive clicks and retweets. For example, your tweet would look like …“Please RT! Learn how to maximize your #insidesales effectiveness, today at 2pmET. Webinar
Click Tip #9: Use verbs and adverbs to drive action, vs. nouns and adjectives
That means an active voice vs. a passive voice drives the best activity. For example, a tweet like Mercedes to go live with #cloud -based #HR #IT system next month to deliver better business value, will perform better for you.
Click Tip #10: Tweet on the weekend
So many channels take the weekend off. I have uncovered TREMENDOUS potential on the weekend! Work on the weekend and you will see click-throughs to your event registration page and content!
Whatever you do, you need to ensure your tweets and messages are relevant and customer-centric. Leave the brand or product feature and benefit pitch to emails and telemarketing and other outbound methods. These 10 tips give you tools that you can immediately use to drive bigger and better demand and lead generation results. Give them a try to see how many more clicks your tweets and messages generate. Gerry Moran
