Determining ROI on Twitter can be a crap shoot. While we all, ultimately, measure ROI in terms of how much money an activity puts in our pockets, Twitter's "payoff" might seem amorphous since the line from "social network" notice to an actual sale can be a long convoluted and amorphous one. Here's a great article on tracking ROI and the differing metrics of a social networking campaign:
http://www.ducttapemarketing.com/blo...s-more-useful/
The key to making your tweets more useful in this fashion is to employ one of the many twitter metrics tools cropping up daily. These tools allow you to understand how the twitterverse is reacting to your tweets. Basically they are link tracking tools that shorten links and give you a dashboard report on clicks and retweets and the like for each of your tweets. Having this kind of data allows me to do a few things of interest.
* Let?s say I find a site I think is cool and tweet it. From my dashboard I can see lots of folks jumped on that and passed it around and also thought it was cool. Bingo! - I?ve got a topic for an expanded blog post.
* Let?s say I write a blog post and point it out on twitter - I can get real-time feedback, over and above comments, on how hot the topic was
* Let?s say I propose a question to my followers or make a strong statement about a marketing tactic. Again, back to my stats I see the entire conversation that surrounded my topic (or not) and I may have a new theory on how to talk about a marketing tactic
* Let?s say I point out several articles I stumble across as good reads and for whatever reason one of the article ignites a storm of reaction - well, maybe I need to look deeper into that topic.
* Let?s say people seem to pass on stuff more rabidly during a certain time of day - maybe I should take note of that
* Let?s say people seem to like certain types of tweets, judeging by how they interact, than others - could that help me tweet better?
One more thing: If you're blogging for influence and using Twitter to cultivate influence, you can piggyback on Retweets by using this
free Retweet Exchange Tool