Using Twitter for brand-building? Hardcore users know one personal account is a full-time job, so nurturing a bunch of client/brand accounts just might make you crazy! But lucky for us, applications that can help simplify your brand-building tweets are showing up almost daily.

Case in point: Tweet Adder. This desktop application, used with care, can be great for marketers who need to grow followers fast, and who repeatedly promote deals or services, but lack the time to devote to the process. Here’s how you might make good use of it:

• Auto-load tweets promoting deals/services/blog posts, and set your publication times. Example: Schedule tweets for publication every 90-120 minutes. Limit the amount of auto-tweets sent in a day.
• Run searches for keywords of interest, say “basketball” or “birthday gifts.” Tweet Adder provides a list of matching profiles you can follow or save for review. You can find, then research, potential clients/heavy tweeters who could become evangelists for you.
• Share music (whose benefits we’ve dished before) with a feature for uploading and sharing MP3s.
• Use conversion (follower:followee) tracking. People look at your follower:followee ratio. Don’t get obsessed, but avoid following hundreds more users than those following you. This suggests you follow indiscriminately and that others haven’t found your content interesting—a sure sign of someone using Twitter to broadcast, not communicate!
• Access and save current/historical trends. Track what’s hot on Twitter and compare it with times past to find patterns in user sentiment.

Note of caution: Automatic ain’t the same as auto-pilot. Using an auto-app like this one to promote your biz works best when someone is at the reins—producing more fresh tweets than packaged ones, and regularly responding to users.

The Po!nt: These days, the right app can help boost a brand. Tweet Adder is a means to build followers fast and tweet promotions. See if it’s a fit for your marketing mix.

by Joe Whyte

On an old episode of Penn & Teller, they addressed numbers, stating at one point, “Numbers don’t lie; the people who use them do.” This couldn’t be more true when interpreting web analytic data. My last post talked about errors matching PPC data with your analytics. This lesson concerns common misinterpretations of data within Google Analytics.

When I take on a new contract, I typically sit down with my client and talk with them about what useful data they need to see. Out of this discussion comes a custom report for analytics data. Typically, I have found that sending over a scheduled Google Analytics report is confusing to executives, since many do not understand it. Often it’s easier to simplify it based on what they’ve identified as their “useful data.”

I assume other people in the industry do this from time to time. When you are reporting daily and weekly numbers, it is easy to misinterpret data. Below are two examples of how this can happen.

New & repeat visitors
If you came to my site for the first time today, left, and then came back again in the same day, you would count as a new visit and a repeat visit. However, the total number of visits would only be one. In this case, if you added new plus repeat visitors together, this is not going to be an accurate total.

Unique visitors summed daily
When you work in an office environment, sometimes executives will look for daily reporting and then at the end of the week ask for a summary of performance. If you are using Excel to track unique visitors per day, you may wind up reporting inaccurate data. A great example of this is if you post a page that gets 2,000 unique visitors on Monday and the SAME visitors return each consecutive weekday — the total of unique visitors for the week would still be 2,000, NOT 10,000.

Be sure you understand the fundamental differences here to ensure you don’t fall into the trap of critical data misinterpretation on your job. In my next post, I will explore the steps you need to take in order to limit data misinterpretation and improve your web analytics setup to show you the most accurate numbers you can get.

By Chris Crum

Help Management Understand the Importance

You may recall Feras Alhlou, who chatted with WebProNews earlier this year after contributing a guest post to Google’s Analytics Blog about using advanced segments in Google Analytics. Alhlou is the president of E-Nor, and he presented at an analytics session at SES this week.

 Alhlou says there is a quote from Albert Einstein that C-level executives, marketing managers and analysts should keep in mind when it comes to establishing and nurturing a web analytics culture in their organizations. That quote is:

“Not everything that can be counted counts, and, not everything that counts can be counted.”

With that in mind, Alhlou provides the following seven practical tips:

1. One size fits none

You need to understand and identify what is important to the organization. Time, money, and resources are limited, so you must use them wisely.

2.Know your audience

Don’t try to impress your boss with a radar map or a 5-dimentional motion chart. The following is an example of what not to start off with, unless your management is very “visually inclined.”

3. Help your audience understand

Try to help your audience understand the basics. Start off with some common web metrics, and then move into task completion/conversion concepts.

4. Plan to integrate cost data

This refers to click spend, banner ad costs, etc. Have a model for ROI (return-on-investment) calculations.

5. Don’t forget non-web Leads

Your site visitors are not all the same. Some of would buy online or submit a form online, while some just like to call and speak with someone. Bring phone data into the mix.

6. A CRM system

For lead generation sites, a CRM system is must. Classify your leads into categories (high quality leads, junk leads, etc.) and bring this insight back into your campaign conversion and ROI calculations. It’s one thing to get 10 leads @ $1000 from campaign A, it is a totally different picture when 7 of these leads are junk!

7. Tie it all together

Tie it all together into business metrics that C-levels and business owners/managers can relate to. At the end of the day, it is not about visits, pageviews, conversions! It is about revenue and net profits!

I would like to thank Feras Alhlou for sharing these tips with WebProNews readers. There’s no question that analytics can make a great impact on marketing, and if you work in a company that isn’t doing all it should be in this department, these are some good tips to help change that.