Twitter offers valuable insights into your customers and their behaviour which can in turn be used to improve the way you engage with them.
It is important to understand the information available in Twitter analytics and what it is telling you. While there is a lot of data, like financial information, marketing information can be distilled into some key reports that are easy to monitor.
The data can be used to make adjustments to your marketing strategy and then check whether the new initiatives work. While others may implement your marketing strategy, you need to oversee the relationship with your customers.
Your involvement is important because you understand your business from the inside and in depth. Your marketing people may understand how to use Twitter and other social media tools to best advantage but they cannot hope to know your business in the way that you do.
Good communication is therefore essential in order to have a constructive conversation about your social media marketing strategy and in particular the tools like Twitter.
Talk to your marketing experts
Having looked at your Twitter analytics, you will have some idea of what posts have been most successful and those that have been less so. You might check timings and what impact they had on orders or follow up action by checking other reports. What are the factors that may have influenced these results? Is it to do with the time of posting, the wording, the topic, use of visuals and hashtags? The answers to these questions are something your marketing experts should be able to help with.
Another thing to check is who have been your top Twitter followers each month and investigate further whether any of them are important influencers in your industry.
Another consideration is whether a particular geographic area is important to your business. If so, then it may be useful to adjust your Twitter settings so that you can monitor what is happening in that area that may be relevant to your business.
You can also use http://twitaholic.com/ to identify the most active Twitter users in your chosen geographic area. If your Twitter activity can help you connect with these people they are potential advocates for your brand.
Refining your activity is going to take time, patience, subtlety and regular monitoring. It is not something busy managers or CEOs will have the time or perhaps the skill to do for themselves.
However, understanding the basics of the analytics data will help to facilitate a more productive conversation about strategy development with those responsible for carrying out your social media marketing.