Thanks to Drew Ellis, a new friend from the UK, I discovered a nifty tool today called TweetReach. You enter a distinct search term, url or hashtag, and the software searches a maximum of 50 tweets for free.

For $20 you can order a full report, which will contain all mentions of your search term over the past 7 days or maximum 1500 results (limits imposed by Twitter.) I find the cost of the report a bit high – using TweetReach for something like a marketing campaign is a very appealing way to see the effectiveness and what people are saying about it, but $20 on just that every week (or however long the campaign runs) might be more than people want to pay. 

Still… this is a GREAT concept and I love the way the information is presented. I did a search on a recent article I know many of us passed around, which had a somewhat unique title “Becoming P2P”. Here are the results of that search.  Another dear friend named Scott Gould wrote about this too, so his article results are combined in this search, which is great (for my purposes) because the topic is the same.

You can see the “Total Exposure” which shows that over 31,000 people saw something about this article 4-7 times! That’s awesome… I am not sure of the social media conversion rates on something like this, but in advertising (say, for a print ad or television spot) the numbers are something like 7x exposure needed before one takes action. Psychologically, seeing repeated exposures builds familiarity and confidence, which is why many companies don’t realize to place on print ad in a trade magazine is not the most effective way to spend marketing dollars – it’s not enough exposure. I just read yesterday, that consumers who are exposed to a brand’s social media efforts and paid search programs are 2.8x more likely to search for that brand’s products. For example, if you do paid Google searches, using social media in addition is almost 3x more effective. So you can begin to see where this sort of Total Exposure information can come in handy.

A lot of traditional marketing pro’s want to see who the “influencers” are. TweetReach shows the impressions broken down by Twitterer. I don’t know how accurate that is – I guess it seems unreal to me that my mentions of this particular article would be so high – nearly 124,000 impressions! That just seems crazy. But this list shows who is talking about you, who believes in what you’re doing, and who is helping to spread your particular message.

So, if you like this tool, there are some things you can do in advance to help you later search for it effectively. All of these can be changed by users when they retweet or share it somewhere, so you probably want to search using all these methods to discover the real results.

1. Use a unique URL. Bit.ly and many other URL shorteners let you add a “custom” addition to the url and you should do that – make it short as possible and as UNIQUE as possible (in case others have used those same words. In this search example, the URL could have been something like http://bit.ly/bep2p  Of course, the boring old numbers and letters url’s will work just fine also.
2. Use a unique hashtag. The author of this article is @thebrandbuilder on Twitter (he happens to be a Twitterface advisor also) and we often refer to him as #TBB. Unfortunately others use that hashtag also for 2 or 3 other things. He could promote his articles distinctly and then search on them later by altering the hashtag to something like #TBB-P2P. That way, if people consistently retweeted that hashtag it would easily distinguish all of these searches in TweetReach.
3. Use a unique title or phrase in your tweet. I happened to think of the words “Becoming P2P” because it was short and we’ve all been talking about it the past two days. Those words are fairly unique, but if you want to use TweetReach a lot you probably need to think about how you are going to find these results in advance.

Go play with TweetReach! We will be looking into integrating or pointing over to it from Twitterface in the future – it’s that good a tool.

And read Becoming P2P: Principle Characteristics of the New Social Business if you want to see how business is already shifting and shaping – this is such an exciting time to be part of this movement.

ADDENDUM
Last night on Twitter Olivier Blanchard and Don Bart, my social media ROI experts, reminded me that Impressions only mean “opportunities to see”. A tweet sent, is not a guaranteed tweet read. The same could be said about direct mail – some of it gets thrown in the trash, but the difference is the reader has to mentally process it before deciding to do that. An advertisement may or may not be noticed in a magazine (with lots of other content around it.) But a tweet may never have been seen at all… that’s why TweetReach’s graph of the number of times a tweet was sent to a number of people (what they call impressions) is so helpful. Having exposure to the information more than once, if it’s important to you, can make a difference in the reality of how many people clickthru to read more information, visit your site, interact with you on Twitter, or do a search for your products or services.

ADDENDUM 2
It’s important to search for your entry several ways to see all the results. For example, if I search for this article at TweetReach using the shortened bit.ly link I originally posted, I get much smaller results than I did using the title of the post. People’s links get changed or re-shortened, or they deliberately do it to track via some other program, so url’s are highly inconsistent (which is why bit.ly aggregates results based on the long url.) Contrast those results with the search on the full post title and you’ll see many more people retweeted this than I knew about, because my name was not in the retweets. Sweet!