Hey, Kyle! Although tracking sales from Twitter can be tricky, I’d suggest using coupon codes that are only shared on Twitter, hashtags to track campaigns, bit.ly links, and taking into account Google Analytics traffic from Twitter. You can get very creative with a few of these options and then stay on top of the stats. In addition, I wouldn’t recommend running campaigns for any longer than 7 days. This keeps your campaigns fresh and allows you to constantly experiment with what works best for your brand. Hope that helps! 🙂

Kyle – That is often difficult. You may be able to track clich throughs to your website from Twitter, or you can ask customers where they heard about you. The challenge is, while some sales do come directly from Twitter (They see your tweet and click then to buy), most come indirectly or are influenced by Twitter. Meaning, perhaps they follow on Twitter, view your tweets, see the special you are running, but that plays just part of the role in making their buying decision. They mayh also received an email, seen a post card, heard an add, maybe social media boosted search engine rankings and they found you as a result of a search etc, then, they have a need and think of you and buy. So, Twitter, and social media, often has a much larger impact on sales than companies think.

What I do with most of my clients is ask them to give me 6 months, or at least 3 months where the only thing they change in their marketing is Social Media, and see how that impacts sales. I’d love to hear though from you and others on how they track sales. Perhaps we can learn from each other on that topic.

Followup question.
What methods do you recommend for actually tracking sales from twitter?

Great thoughts, both of you.

I do put all new followers into a List, so can “follow” them that way, however they are admittedly at a slightly lower priority than those who are current customers. It’s awesome to have a brand profile that can be so close to the people that love them most, people using the product.

Hi, Kyle!!

Fantastic question – thanks for asking it because I’m sure you aren’t the only one wondering about it. As KP explained, there’s no one social strategy that works for everyone, except consistency. With @MacJoFit’s goals, heavy following was a crucial part of that strategy. But I think if you go check out the timeline, you’ll see the incredible amount of interactions, engagement and conversations being had thanks to the relationships that those numbers helped develop. It’s a VERY active account. There’s definitely a lot of debate about whether or not to follow everyone who follows you, but it can be a great practice for some accounts. Thanks to Twitter features like Lists, it makes it possible for accounts to follow large amounts of people and filter the followers, so it’s not too overwhelming.

But I love that you are proud of what you created and are successful with your own strategy because inevitably, that’s what it’s all about – to find out what fits our needs or the needs of a client.

Again, thank you for taking the time to ask – we value your input and wish you the best!

Great points. My answer is one of those, “it depends,” replies. Social Media is not one size fits all. With @MacJoFit, I did follow a good amount of people within the fitness industry that were local to her, and that did play a roll in the followe growth. We also followed many people whose content we wanted to view, which has helped Makenna learn more about the Health and Fitness industry by seeing what others are posting. Also, we did follow back, as you see, almost all people who did follow. This is not a strategy that I would recommend for everyone, but it was essential for MacJoFit. We needed engagement. We needed people to feel Makanna was connecting with them and interest in them. The Fitness industry is full of people throwing out information, but few to none of the top trainers actually engage with their followers, nor do they follow people back. So, we went a different route to stand out. In general, my advice would be to follow most people who follow you. Its “social” media, and part of that relationhship is following people. I will say though, in terms of following people to get them to follow you, that strategy can only take you too far. Twitter will suspend an account for aggressive following. I do recommend following key targeted people and itneracting, but not in having following people in hopes they follow back as being your sole or main twitter growth strategy.

I hope my feedback helps!

Thanks for your thoughts, great article!