How to measure the ROI for a X (formerly Twitter) chat will depend entirely on your goals.
Because social media can seem easy or simple, in the sense that you hear people saying “My 12 year old niece is a Facebook expert”, people want the results and the value to be obvious. Unfortunately, the value of social media is not a one-size-fits-all and can take some serious consideration to assess.
The X Chat, also called a Tweet-Up, or Tweet Chat, is and organized online X conversation unified by a hashtag. Those participating will all follow the hashtag and converse with each other for the duration. Some examples of X chats include:
A parenting magazine may decide to have a X Chat about toilet training, in which they ask their followers to use the hashtag #ttraining .
A hockey team may have a sponsored X chat during the broadcast of a big game using the hashtag #BrandLeafs
A pet food company could have a X Chat about dog training #BrandPups
… you get the idea
1. Let’s start with the investment, or the “I” in ROI. What you need to think about at the very least is the following:
- Staffing / monitoring / driving the conversation
- Promotion (X chats don’t just happen by magic)
- Script / Content creation ahead of time
- Client management (if sponsored) / Internal management
2. What are the goals of the Tweetup? Here are some of the possible brand goals of a tweetup:
- Gain more social media followers
- Get subscribers to email newsletter
- Collect lead information for potential clients
- Drive entries to a sponsored contest
- Drive traffic to a website
- Raise brand / product awareness
- Increase brand affinity
- Increase profile of brand representatives/personalities
- Find out more about your X followers
- Get customer feedback and suggestions
- Discover influential “fans”
We can assume that all of the above will, either directly or indirectly lead to sales/revenue, putting the “R” in ROI.
Once you understand your goals and how they derive value, you need to measure the different elements wherever possible. Not all is measurable unfortunately. That said:
Measuring an increase in followers is easy. Google Analytics will assist with goals relating to driving traffic to a website. If you want to collect entries to a contest or newsletter signups, you can always create a new tag or link in order to measure specific entries coming from the chat. But how can you find out more about the participants and get a sense of the scope of the endeavour?
Hashtag reports will be able to give you this information, and this is way easier than trying to keep track of the tweeters and the number of tweets.
Check out an example of our X Chat Hashtag Report right here.
Make your own report to assist in measuring the ROI of your X Chat here.