The joy of web analytics

The joys of website analytics

How do you measure your progress on your website? Do you even measure it at all? When I began my website career I thought wow, I am a genius at this. I have a great design, people are constantly telling me how beautiful it is, and I am positive customers are visiting the site…Or are they?

If you aren’t

How’d they know to tweet me that I needed a hug? (or whatever you needed)

Have you ever gotten a tweet from a complete stranger who wasn’t following you and that you weren’t following, that seemed to know all about what you had been discussing for the day?  Have you ever wondered “How’d they do that?” Well, it’s not as confusing as you might think.

I had a friend call me last night and ask me about this so I thought I would write about it.  She got a bunch of “Hugs” after tweeting that she was sad…I laughed because I thought she knew better! Yes, my friends, if you want to get a hug, then just say you are sad or lonely.  So, here is how it works.

I subscribe to socialoomph.com as I have mentioned in the past, but you can do this with just about any of the online management systems for Twitter. So, feel free to use their systems as well, I just prefer socialoomph.  Using socialoomph’s system all you have to do is this:

1. Have an account set up
2. Click on my account
3. Click on other tools
4. from the lower tab choose keword alert emails

Click to enlarge the example below

You will be given a set of instructions that are easy to follow but I will explain them a little more just so you will be even more excited to join. What you get to do now is type in all the “Keywords” that you want socialoomph to send you an email on from people on twitter tweeting about…so, lets say you want to know every time someone says “I’m hungry, I wish I had something to eat. I’m starving” The keywords you would type in would probably be “hungry, starving, and eat” (one at a time of course) You can type up to 50 different keywords.  Now, what happens next is you can tell socialoomph how often to send you the digest.  Which is very helpful as well.  So now you understand why you get those random people sending you tweets, and following you.  I used to wonder why when I would say the word “sex” or “please porn stars stop following me” why I would suddenly have hundreds of them following me. Well, it was because they had their keyword alerts set up to know if someone types the words sex, porn, etc in their tweet, then they must want to be followed or they must be interested in something sexual.  It was a big mistake.

Side note, if that ever happens to you before blocking the porn star, go to their lists and see if its full of more porn stars and if so, block all of them first, then block the porn star that was following you.

Well, I hope all of this was helpful and you are able to use the keyword digest to better market your products in a tasteful way to some new tweeters.  You can really get creative with it as you can imagine. The downside is if your not careful, you can get yourself blocked. So be tasteful and always remember, people on Twitter are looking for useful information that can help them.