How BBC Breaking News Track Individual Tweets

In a previous blog I mentioned how it's possible to separately track the activity of numerous tweets that all point to the same page by adding dummy text to the web address e.g., www.analysismarketing.com/#blogtest

This means when you use a tweet shortening service (either directly within Twitter or using a tool such as Bit.ly) each unique address e.g., /#01, /#02 will be given a different shortened link.  Without this, every time you tweet a link to the same page it generates the same shortened link making it difficult to attribute activity to individual Tweets.

A good example of an organisation that puts this in to the practise is the BBC with the @BBCBreaking account.  Depending on how big a story is, there might be several tweets linking to the same article.  An example of this was the arrest of Max Clifford.

@BBCBreaking sent out two tweets, one at 1:11pm and one at 1:19pm on Thursday 6th Dec.  Both were to the same webpage but as there were dummy details added, they have separate short-codes:

Click-Through volumes from the two tweets.  The first is around 40% higher overall but the response curves have similar patterns

The two tweets have different addresses: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-20627765#TWEET424921 and http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-20627765#TWEET424943 but go to the same physical page (i.e., everything from the # onwards gets ignored).

If you're promoting the same article/page on numerous occasions, this method is a way of tracking the individual piece of activity that has driven that click.  This principle works across wherever you put the weblink (Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn/Email etc.,) and gives you a lower level of detail than would otherwise be available.

Website: http://www.analysismarketing.com/ 

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/danjbarnett 

Twitter: http://twitter.com/analysismktg 

Twitter Analysis - Ben Goldacre

Previous posts have focused around the Twitter activity of journalists at The Times promoting their articles.  This blog looks at the activity of someone who appears to have a great understanding of making the most of Twitter.

Ben Goldacre is a doctor who is arguably best known for his bad science articles in the Guardian (and book of the same name), he has over 230k Twitter followers so must be doing something right.

The reason I have picked Ben for this blog is that he is a good example of someone who is willing to repeat his message (but not in a spammy way), a simple example of this is where he tweeted a link to his article around Glaxo SmithKline.

The tweets linking to the same article were sent out at 9:37pm and 10:57pm on the 11th Oct and also 10:36am on the 12th (oldest one displayed first):

The response by hour shows how the third Tweet has almost double the response of the initial tweet (there were sent at almost the same time past the hour so a pretty fair comparison can be made between the two).  It's possible that just after 10:30 on a Friday morning is the perfect time to hit people on a mid-morning break looking for something interesting to read to distract them from work.

  Response by Hour to the link mentioned in the Tweets

There are other tweets in between these so it is not as if Ben is just hammering home a single point with nothing else to say.

Another good thing that Ben does is not assume that anyone reading any single tweet will know the whole context of what he is saying, rather than just linking to something once and then sending follow up tweets talking about that subject, Ben includes the link for reference in each tweet (as seen below, again there will be tweets on other areas between these tweets).

A series of tweets around the same topic (most recent first), there's every chance that a follower could first be reading Ben's tweets on this subject at any point so the link helps to provide context (and drive activity).

If you're only following 10 people on Twitter then obviously this would be quite annoying but generally people are following 100+ accounts and not checking their timeline every 5 minutes so the risk of over-exposure is minimal even if I did see someone sarcastically tweet that they didn't realise Ben has a book out at the moment.

Find out more about how we can help you with data at www.analysismarketing.com

Dan Barnett

Director of Analytics

Website: http://www.analysismarketing.com/

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/danjbarnett 

Twitter: http://twitter.com/analysismktg

It's not just what you say, it's how you say it

In previous blogs looking at the activity of The Times dropping the paywall an hour at a time for selected articles, I've looked at the value of resending the same/similar message.  In this example, I look at the fact that it's not just follower volumes that's important it's relevance (and also the message itself).

In a piece on the recent sponsorship deal with Wonga for Newcastle United, George Caulkin rails against the increasingly depressing impact of business on football.  This was sent at 4pm on Tue 9th October with the article being free to view between 4pm and 5pm

This was retweeted by a few other people but as of 4.30pm had only had a few hundred clicks even though George has over 34k followers (not a bad resposnse for a tweet though).

By the end of the hour though, the link had been clicked over 2,600 times.

This was due in part to George promoting the article again with a follow up tweet:

This tweet was then retweeted at 4:42pm by Joey Barton who has 1.7m followers, creating the first of the two large spikes.  Joey had already promoted the article with the direct link (and had some Tweets back and fore with George).

The second spike was due in part a tweet at 4.52pm from Mirror reporter Ollie Holt which both praised the article and also reminded people that there was only a few minutes to go before the article was no longer free.

Despite the fact that Ollie Holt with 154k followers has less than a tenth of the followers of Joey Barton, it would appear that Holt has generated a greater response.

This will be for a number of reasons: the piece is personally endorsed rather than just retweeted (where it will appear as coming from George Caulkin with just details of 'retweeted by Joey Barton' at the bottom) and there is also a direct call to action: 'Read it quickly. Only free until 5pm'.

As mentioned in other posts, the details above are for visits using the Bitly link mentioned in the tweets, there will be cases where people have found it themselves or choose to link directly without the Bitly link so these figures are more the impact of initial tweets not the overall activity to that page.

It can sometime seem like Social Media is a whole new world and all the rules of marketing have changed but that's often not the case.  As can be seen from the impact of the enthusiastic endorsement of Ollie Holt's tweet combined with the time limited call to action a lot of the traditional methods of generating response are still valid.

Dan Barnett

Director of Analytics

Website: http://www.analysismarketing.com/

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/danjbarnett 

Twitter: http://twitter.com/analysismktg

Sweating the Assets – Making the most of what you’ve got with Twitter

As mentioned in previous posts, Twitter is a great way to get your message out to a wide audience but its quick moving nature means your message will probably not be seen by the vast majority who follow you.  Using examples from a number of major websites, in this (and subsequent) blogs I’ll show how most have plenty of scope to make more of what they have.

Bitly is one of the most used URL shortening services and one great feature it has is the ability for anyone to be able to track the performance of a link simply by adding a ‘+’ to that link.  You don’t get the full functionality that you would have if it was your Bitly link but there’s more than enough to get a feel for how a link is performing.

As with any business where their product is content based, The Times are trying to make the most of monetising their product.  Where most go for an ad-funded model, the Times have set up a Paywall to make their online content subscriber-only.

Presumably as a means of quantifying the kind of volume of visitors they could reach and/or to show potential readers what they are missing out on (and encourage to subscribe), they have recently started 1 hour ‘freeviews’ of particular content.

An example of this was an article about Joe Cole and Liverpool that was made free to view between 12pm and 1pm on Tue 21^st August.  The chart below shows the click figures during this hour for a link to the piece tweeted by journalist who wrote the article - Tony Barrett @tonybarrettimes (92k followers):

Tweets from @tonybarrettimes regarding the article

Clicks by Minute between 12:00-12:59pm

This second post was retweeted at 12:15pm by Phil McNulty @philmcnulty who is the Chief Football Writer for the BBC Sports Website (160k followers) and 12:16pm by Oliver Kay @oliverkaytimes who is the Chief Football Correspondent for The Times (147k followers).

Other people of note such as Rory Smith @rorysmithtimes (56k followers) mention the article via Twitter but put a direct link to the Times website URL (fine for them for their back end analysis using a tool such as Google Analytics but won’t show up on the Bitly chart above).

From the figures above there are a few points worth making:

·  

• It may not be the most important marketing channel, but Twitter can deliver a sizeable audience within a short space of time
• The retweets from Tony’s followers (especially from well-followed accounts) is vital to the overall click volume
• By using the same Bitly link, it’s not possible to separate out the impact of Tony’s two tweets at 10:56am and 12:11pm (the latter is likely to have driven the vast majority but we can’t be sure)
• There was scope from around 12:30pm onwards for another push of the message from Tony’s feed anyone logging in to Twitter around then would probably have missed any previous mention of the link
• If you had a number of Times journalist tweeting the link every 5 minutes or so (e.g., 12 journalists tweet the link once each over the hour), would that be classed as good marketing or would it be felt that goes against the organic, free-for-all ‘spirit’ of Twitter.  Nobody likes the feeling they’re being marketed to, even though the truth is you are most of the time

Dan Barnett

Director of Analytics

Website: http://www.analysismarketing.com/

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/danjbarnett 

Twitter: http://twitter.com/analysismktg