New followers

Whilst ‘new followers’ can be a good indication of brand awareness, you should take this number with a pinch of salt as you may have gained followers from auto-follow services who aren’t actually reading any of your tweets.

However, if you feel confident that your audience is growing organically ie. have chosen to follow you as a result of the content you are publishing, then it’s worth tracking this number as clearly the more followers you have, the greater your brand awareness.

Hashtags

Often used by tweeters when referring to your company as opposed to addressing you directly with your Twitter handle. These people are aware of your brand but are not directly engaging with it.  

By keeping an eye on hashtags relating to your company, you can get involved in the conversation – for example by thanking them – and move them from the awareness stage to the engagement stage.

Retweets

These people are engaging with your brand and hence have a stronger awareness of it. By re-tweeting your content, they deem it valuable enough to want to tell their own audience about it.

When you get re-tweets, check out the size of the re-tweeter’s audience; the bigger it is, the more brand awareness opportunities you have. 

 

Mentions

The number of mentions you get is a great way to see how many people are interacting with your brand, either as a direct reply to something you have tweeted (first image) or if they refer to you in a tweet directed to someone else (second image).

These people are engaging with you and have a good awareness of your brand. 

Referral traffic from Twitter

You should also track the amount of traffic driven to your website or blog that comes from Twitter which you can do easily through Google Analytics. However, as Matt Owen pointed out yesterday, measuring Twitter via Google Analytics isn’t always straightforward. 

By visiting your website, these people have been moved one step further along the awareness cycle and have developed an even stronger awareness of your brand.

By frequently posting high quality, interesting content on your website, you are continually giving your followers a reason to visit your website which will not only strengthen brand awareness amongst your current audience but also widen brand awareness as your followers share your content.

As a rule, you should see a positive correlation between the number of RTs / mentions and referral traffic to your website.

Third party software

To finish off (although this could easily be a whole post in its own right), you can measure a whole host of metrics using social media management tools such as Sprout, Hootsuite, Conversocial etc. They will provide you with everything from ‘number of new followers’ and ‘engagement levels’ to ‘reach’ and ‘influence’.

What about you?

Do you measure awareness of your brand on Twitter? Are there any metrics that I’ve missed that you’ve found useful or any software that you particularly rate? I’d love to hear your thoughts.