"50% of What I do is Genius, the Other 50% Sucks"

A few days ago I met with a friend who wanted to create a social media campaign about an upcoming non-profit’s 100th anniversary. The nonprofit had a twitter feed, but my friend had little experience crafting a campaign. She presented me with 18 text0only tweets.

“What’s the goal of the campaign?” I asked her.

“I guess to drum up excitement for the event,” she said after a thinking for a moment.

“Okay. How will you know if a tweet worked” I asked attempting to guide her to my line of thought.

“People will be talking about it,” she ventured.

“Okay….but how do you know which tweet worked, and which didn’t?” I asked.

I had flummoxed her.

The situation reminded me of an saying among my grandpa’s generation of marketers: “50% of what I do works like a charm, the other 50% doesn’t…I just don’t know which is which.”

While there are some things in this era to be nostalgic about (three martini lunches come to mind), wasting half of your efforts isn’t one of them. Now we can use customized shortened links to determine which tweets are driving traffic. This way every tweet has a goal--to drive the audience to click a link (which can lead to a blog post, a video, a picture, or the registration page itself).

Had my friend gone with her first inclination, she would have been like the ad men in the 60’s, not knowing which half of her efforts were working. By giving each tweet a measurable goal, she can optimize her efforts.

Use link shortners like bit.ly, or tinyurl.com. If you are linking to a transaction page (such as a registration page), I’d recommend creating a funnel in Google Analytics so you can see if people are clicking through, but not completing a transaction.

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