Resonance: Twitter Leads the Way in Social Media Metrics
The news media is all abuzz this week about Twitter’s revenue model and the launch of “promoted tweets.” Advertising Age, Financial Times, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal are just a few of the national business publications that covered the story. But Twitter came up with more than a revenue model that is based, at least in part, on advertising. With a new metric called “resonance” Twitter is, to my mind, beginning to frame how the effectiveness of social media for marketers can be measured and how we can begin to understand what’s important in designing social media campaigns. Essentially, Twitter’s advertising model allows brands to promote tweets by placing them on top of a Twitter search result, and as with other paid search results, there will be visual identifiers to separate promoted tweets. More important, the new metric measures how well a particular tweet resonates with the audience—the number of people who see the post, pass it on to others, reply to it or take any other action such as clicking on the links. If a tweet falls below a designated resonance score, it will no longer be displayed as a promoted post. The brand is not charged, but by the same token users will not see irrelevant content in their Twitter stream.
There are many ramifications of this concept of resonance in Twitter advertising. Customers will applaud the removal of messages they don’t find useful. Marketers will be forced to think before they simply dispense information. To me, it is an advertising model that is tailored to the social media context and not just borrowed or adapted from print à la the early days of display advertising.
The Altimeter Group, whose founder Charlene Li wrote the social media primer Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies, posted what I believe is the best explanation and analysis of “promoted tweets.” I consider it a must-read for all marketers.