Twitter Chats – A Case Study

For the past few months, we’ve been testing out promotion of our e-commerce websites via Twitter chats. We have some metrics to share with everyone today and we will continue to update this article as new metrics come in.

What is a Twitter Chat? Multiple Twitter users get together and tweet (post) under the same hashtag.

Specifics of the chats we participated in:

• They run at a specific time on a specific day – from 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. EST every other Wednesday
• The hashtag is #diabeteschat
• We posted in the chats as: @DiabetesInCntrl, @DoctorsOption and @ADdictingOps
• Each chat is hosted by an expert in a field related to diabetes (a Nutritionist, a nurse, a Diabetes Educator)
• Questions are developed for each chat so that people participating can benefit from guided discussion
• Prizes are usually offered to people that participate and answer questions correctly
• The chat is heavily promoted in the few days before on social media, email newsletters, and websites
• We used Hootsuite to automatically schedule our promotional tweets during the conversation, allowing us to actively engage in the conversation and not have to worry about promotion

Our Goals for Participation:

• To generate more followers and engagement with Twitter profiles
• To increase visits to our e-commerce websites
• To directly attribute sales to the Twitter Chat

Metrics:

What we learned:

• We saw a 700% increase in impressions and an 800% increase in engagements in the day leading up to the chat and the day of the chat.
• Our impressions grew each chat, because our posts were better and got more retweets, so we are naturally improving our chatting abilities.
• We do see a small bump in followers (about 25 new followers) each time we chat. Also, we are seeing that our followers are increasing at a faster rate than previous to the chats, even on days we are not chatting.
• Our sales did not see a significant improvement, so we will continue to try and improve promotional messaging.
• Some of us are better at chatting than others! Going forward, we will use the better chatters on the more prestigious profiles.

The more people involved, the greater the reach. If you are interested in participating in the next Twitter Chat, just to see what it’s all about, email us and we’ll give you specifics: sem@ehsmail.com