How We Use Twitter at Forum One

We have described previously on this blog how Forum One approaches social media in general, as well as our experience with SlideShare and Scribd. In this post, we'll discuss the current glamour child of social media, Twitter.

Twitter is impossible to ignore. It has been embraced by celebrities (Britney Spears, Oprah), adopted by journalists (Anderson Cooper, Nicholas Kristof) and appropriated by politicians (Nancy Pelosi, Sarah Palin). More importantly, it has grown quickly (from 5 million to 50 million users this year) and is becoming a fixture with the influential organizations and individuals with whom we work.

In response to Twitter's influence, we have launched five company Twitter feeds, @ForumOne, @OCReport, @DataMasher, @Legistalker, and @ProjectSpaces (a combined feed is here). These feeds currently have a total of about 15,000 followers, up from 4,000 in August. A number of staff also have personal accounts they manage (on their own time) which include a lot of company re-tweets and information and represent another 15,000 or so followers.

Here is our approach to this growing network:

Goals: As with all social media, we need to be clear about our goals, and whether Twitter supports them or not. In shorthand, our goals are 1) to sell more consulting services and products; 2) strengthen our ties with existing clients; 3) learn about social media to support our consulting; and 4) increase our general name awareness.

Current Priorities: In order to improve our effectiveness, we've focused on a number of areas. We wrote an internal guidelines document structuring our approach to Twitter. We've made a concerted effort to increase our tweeting and follower counts of relevant individuals. We've tried to improve the quality of our content (importance, grammar, format) as well as mentions when appropriate of "Forum One" (as opposed to "the company" or "F1", which we say internally). We've increased re-tweets across accounts when useful, and have decided on metrics of success which we review every other month.

Staffing: We have five staff responsible for most of our account management who all together spend about 15 staff hours per week on Twitter (tweeting, managing followers and answering direct messages). We currently use HootSuite which offers many advantages, but is not strong for joint account management. We've explored CoTweet and other platforms but haven't liked them enough to move.

Results to Date: Last month, across our five accounts, we had 317 tweets. Our "circulation" (tweets x followers) was 1.26 million, with about 5,000 "click-throughs" (which track only URLs shortened via HootSuite -- about one-third of total tweets). This gives us a click-through rate of around 16.7% (clicks divided by total all followers of our five accounts plus staff accounts) -- which is better than other Twitter click-through reports we've seen.

We feel like we've made good progress on all of the "current priorities" listed above. With respect to meeting our principal goals, we have little question that we've strengthened our ties to clients, learned about social media, and raised our company profile. We aren't yet sure about our first (and most important) goal of increasing consulting services or product sales directly attributable to Twitter. Connecting the dots from "marketing" to "sales" is always difficult. We have anecdotal information which is encouraging, but nothing unambiguous.

So on balance, we've invested a fair amount into Twitter, it is performing well in terms of growth and reach, and it clearly provides value towards goals we care about. The jury is still out whether it is crucial to driving our company marketing and growth efforts overall. We'll watch this issue closely over the next few months.

How is Twitter supporting your goals? What sort of performance are you seeing? Let us know in the comments.

Jim Cashel is Chairman at Forum One. Feel free to follow him on Twitter at @Cashel or write him at Cashel@ForumOne.com.