Twitter eCommerce Tools

Read an amazing and pretty comprehensive article from my favourite ecom blogger Linda Bustos at Get Elastic this weekend, all about the tools available to business (and specifically those using Twitter to promote deals), and who have the need to track visitors and get the normal analytics and measurement we expect with everything on the web these days. FEED THE TWEET: Most savvy businesses are already updating a blog, even if it's just to keep customers up to date on outages, new products or changes within the scope of the company. Taking an RSS feed, you can now tweet that content using Twitterfeed or HootSuite. I've been using Twitterfeed to tweet this blog fo a while now, and its a simple and easy to use site. It hasn't let me down, and ensures prompt seeding of my content via all my various channels. ANALYTICS: I've been using Google Analytics to track what links are getting clicked, but I have far less of need for analytics than an eBusiness. The trick I've found, and Linda touches on this point in her article, is that If your followers click on links right out of their own home stream, then all the analytics will tell you is /home .

Fo this reason, if a business wants to get the best possible measurement from Twitter links (and don't forget, these get re-tweeted)the trick is to put campaign parameters into the link before it's shortened. In some cases, since Twitter is so short anyway, if you're going to do some campaign testing, you can put the entire tweet in the campaign parameters of the URL, and simply look at what performs best. Try, tweak, Tweet, Try again. REPUTATION MANAGEMENT: Google alerts are good for blogs and mainstream, but simply don't pick up the tweets fast enough or at all in some cases. Get Elastic recommends taking a feed of a search term from the Twitter Search, but if you're doing active monitoring, you can also try real-time search like Monitter, that literally pours results (in multiple columns) into your browser. I've also heard good things about TweetGrid, but it's not as slick looking. None of the two I've mentioned will actually alert you when your search terms are mentioned, so if you want to be passive, and just be told when the twittersphere is talking about you, try Notify.me. I've heard god things...notify.me demo from notify.me on Vimeo. Get Elastic's blog is great. Check out the full article HERE If you like my additions and help, follow Linda @Roxyyo or me @andrewkinnear