One of the glaring absences in the discussion of how to use social media to achieve marketing goals is the lack of established marketing terms. Since green businesses are big users of Twitter, I think we need to have this conversation!
Traditional marketing terms are just words that have used for quite a long while to name different ways of accomplishing marketing goals.Though tactics may have changed from relying on newspapers to relying on television advertising to new interest in social media, the goals and what we want to accomplish in the end have remained the same. That’s why I find it odd that perfectly good words like “impressions” and “reach” are so often absent from the discussion on social media.
Let’s review.
In advertising terms, “impressions” means how many times a consumer sees your message. This is measured across media. A TV viewer may see your commercial 5 or more times before it registers or sparks their interest in your product. Media buyers calculate the number of times specific consumers see a commercial before making the buy.
“Reach” refers to the actual number of consumers who see your message once. Obviously the more of your target consumers you reach often, with lots of impressions, the greater the chances she’ll buy your product.
And, so I ask, why does this topic not come up in discussions of social media? Yes, people do talk about followers and friends and quality followers and friends and fans and number of followers on Twitter, Facebook, SU, Myspace, etc, etc. This does address the concept of “reach” – sort of.
But what about impressions? Especially on Twitter, we usually tweet a post or an interesting thought…once. And, of course, at least, I’d say 80-90% of our followers don’t even see the tweet…unless it is retweeted. Of course, that is often the goal, but, what about if we tweeted one message a number of times to ensure that all of our key target sees it? Would that be considered bad twettique? Is that abusing our followers? Would we rapidly have deluge of people “unfollowing”?
I wonder.
As I work more with clients to develop corporate programs for social media, I wonder if leaving impressions out of the equation is precluding us from developing real conversations with consumers. If the goal of social media is to engage customers, surely they want to see what we have to say…so they can comment and give their own ideas?
It is my feeling that there is a way to accomplish this. Taking different angles to provide the same message; retweeting the retweeters and optimally finding new ways to increase impressions without boring your followers to death
You can find me on Twitter @mcmilker where I try not to be boring.
Great post on Twitter impressions! FYI you are the #1 result for Twitter + Impressions .
Very interesting post, thank you :O)
Something you can do is post the same link multiple times with different headlines…that’s the best way of getting around increasing your impressions.
I definitely agree with you though, there is definitely not enough talk about the number of impressions you are actually getting by tweeting. It’s almost impossible to figure out though because people read their Tweet timeline on Twitter or other applications that use the Twitter API. If it weren’t for the API, Twitter could possibly give us the impressions for our tweets and it would be completely accurate. I think it is safe to assume that approximately .3 – 1% of your Followers see your Tweets in addition to people who might see retweets. What do you think?