Twitter Integration Enhancement Ideas

As I was at Omniture Summit last week, I couldn’t believe that it had already been a year since I started talking about integrating Twitter data into Omniture SiteCatalyst! Since I haven’t seen many updates about this integration come from Omniture, I thought I would share a few enhancements I have made over the year in case any of them are useful to those out there using the integration…

Competitor Twitter Share
When I first envisioned importing Twitter data into SiteCatalyst, my primary focus was tracking how often my brand was mentioned and importing the brand-related tweets. This allowed me to monitor my brand usage and filter tweet reports to send the right tweets to the right people based upon search phrases. However, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that this integration could be used to keep tabs on competitors as well. Instead of setting one “Brand Mentions” Success Event, you could expand the scope of what is tracked and also grab tweets mentioning your competitors and set a second Success Event named “Competitor Tweets.” This second Success Event allows you to trend your competitors and track them on the same SiteCatalyst dashboard you use to track your own brand:

This led me to another cool idea…Why not track overall “Competitor Tweet Share” in which you quantify the % of tweets your brand gets in relation to those of your competitors? This would allow you to trend your “share of twitter” for your narrow competitive niche. To do this, create a Calculated Metric as follows:

This results in a graph like this which allows you to see when spikes occur to see if local events or press releases move the needle:

You can also set Alerts based upon this Calculated Metric to be notified when you are spiking or tanking in relation to your competitors!

General Tweets
The next concept I thought about was “general tweets” that were related to a business. For example, if you are Coca-Cola, you might want to keep tabs on tweets mentioning “soda” or “soft drink.” However, you wouldn’t want these counted as “Brand Tweets” or “Competitor Tweets,” so instead you can set a third Success Event called “Twitter General Mentions” and specify a list of keywords that should trigger this Success Event. This allows you to see if a list of “general” keywords related to your business is rising or falling over time to gauge the general level of interest in your category over time:

#Fail
Lastly, I decided that the #Fail hashtag was too good to pass up. If your brand is mentioned in the same tweet as the #fail hashtag, you probably want your social media team (if you have one!) to be alerted at once! To do this, all you have to do is create a scheduled report with #Fail in the search box and schedule it to run hourly. Unfortunately, SiteCatalyst delivers hourly reports whether there is data or not (to stop this please vote for this idea) so you may need your social media folks create an Outlook rule to filter the alerts that say “No Data” in the subject.

In addition, you can perform the same exercise for your “Competitor Tweets” since your social media team may want to be notified when your competitors have a #Fail hashtag in tweets mentioning their brand name!

So there you have it…a few minor updates or enhancements to the Twitter – SiteCatalyst integration. If you have other ideas, please leave a comment here…Thanks!