An update on #tweetsforboobs, but first … thanks for everyone’s participation so far. You all have been amazing!!! Keep it up!

How #tweetsforboobs Started (if you’re curious)

We’re really happy to be involved with the #tweetsforboobs twitter campaign for breast cancer awareness. At the beginning of September I decided I wanted to do something non-profit oriented on Twitter. I bounced the idea off of my buddy Josh Strebel, he liked it and reminded me that October is breast cancer awareness month. I have a few women very close to me who are currently fighting breast cancer or have survived it. Because of that, I really wanted to see if we could make something work, on Twitter, to 1) help raise awareness, and 2) generate donations. A few days later we bought the domain tweetsforboobs.org and started putting things in motion.

I had noticed a few successful Twitter promotional givaways like the #moonfruit campaign. I had also noticed a few other non-profit efforts that were successful as well, so we tried to model those. I started reaching out to potential sponsors, to match $1 for every hashtag tweeted. The problem was, it was a little late in the game to find a sponsor at the level we needed. I reached out to Komen Phoenix and Komen National, but again it was too late to get any of their contacts committed. About a week before October 1 we gave up on finding a sponsor and realized we could do this without one.

How #tweetsforboobs Works (if you don’t know already)

If you’re not familiar with it, basically we (ie: tweetsforboobs.org) keeps track of every account which mentioned #tweetsforboobs and counts that as a $1 pledge. People can pledge all they want through October, and at the end of October the site will DM each participating account their pledge total with a link to our Susan G. Komen donation page. This model met a few requirements: 1) pledging / donating needed to be easy 2) it needed to be public via Twitter, which raises awareness and 3) we couldn’t touch the money. Brian Roy hooked us up with a JustSignal account (thanks!), to track Twitter mentions, and over the course of a couple days, Josh designed and built out http://tweetsforboobs.org. We put the site live late Friday the 25th of September.

#tweetsforboobs Status

Alright … enough back story, lets get down to it. How has the campaign done so far?

Goal 1 = raise breast cancer awareness on Twitter.
Goal 2 = raise donations.

I’ll start with Goal 2 because it’s still early October and frankly, at this pace we won’t meet it. We’re almost at $900 pledged a week into October, which is great, but not enough. So … if you’re reading this please help!!! We’ll do another post summing up the campaign when it’s all said and done, with a more detailed analysis on who pledged what and who actually followed through with their donations.

As for goal #1, I think we’ve been successful so far and if you like data, here’s why

The first thing we started tracking was the bit.ly link included in the suggested tweet text. You can check that out in real-time here http://bit.ly/2l4npd+. Our link has been clicked almost 3,000 times and the aggregate link has been clicked almost 3,200 times. Pretty cool!

Google Analytics is showing us we’ve had 2,807 visits to http://tweetsforboobs.org and 2,170 unique visitors. We’ve had visitors from 59 different countries. That’s not bad either!

What we really need to know, though, is how much exposure our hashtag, #tweetsforboobs, has received. This is a little bit more difficult to measure, as Twitter is fairly new and all the social media monitoring solutions are therefore, also new. I reached out to a few I knew off the top of my head, Radian 6 and ScoutLabs … both basically gave me the cold shoulder. Radian 6 generously offered their “non-profit” pricing which was around $250 / month right off the bat. ScoutLabs didn’t offer anything more then their 30-days free which I’ve been using somewhat. It really doesn’t give much Twitter data, just a list of all the tweets matching our filter. Not much help here…

I was hoping for something more insightful. I asked Brian what we could get from JustSignal, since we’re already using it to track mentions. From http://tweetsforboobs.org, we know that 895 tweets have included the hashtag #tweetsforboobs. We also know who’s using it the most, from the top BRAs leaderboard. Out of the box JustSignal gives us some interesting details like most frequent re-tweeters, tweets per day and tweets per hour (yesterday).

What I wanted to know was what kind of exposure this has had. How many streams has the hashtag made it into? Who’s helped us the most, in terms of exposure? I needed some more data for that and JustSignal helped me get it. I was going to get into TweetMeme’s new analytics, but they only track links

We have all the twitter accounts which tweeted the hashtag, so I got their tweet count (for #tweetsforboobs) and their follower count. Their follower count we can think of as Unique Reach. I multiplied their follower count by the amount of times they tweeted #tweetsforboobs to get the Reach per Account then added all those up to get the Total Campaign Reach and Total Unique Reach.

So, our hashtag has had a Total Unique Reach of 625,627 and a Total Campaign Reach of 1,257,570 for an average 2.01 hashtags per feed. Basically, #tweetsforboobs has made it into 625,627 unique account streams on average, 2.01 times.

I’ve also broken down Total Reach per Account, showing the top 25 accounts here…

There are obviously some caveats to this, like accounts don’t = viewed or even people; as well as a number of other issues, but it’s the quickest and simplest metric I could put together today.

What’s Next?

First and foremost, we need more support and we’re asking for your help. We’d really like to reach our pledge goal by the end of October and YOU are the ones who make that happen.

As far as the data goes … I’d really like to be able to see who has been responsible for getting the most people involved. Getting re-tweet and reply data into this will be able to show us some interesting things. Specifically, we’d be able to understand who is responsible for what percentage of the total amount pledged, beyond just how much they’ve pledged themselves. We would be able to see how much influence, in dollars, each participating Twitter account has.

Thanks again for everyone’s participation so far!!

‘Social media’ is the new craze because of how large sites like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter are getting. The web has been social since it’s existence, it’s all about communication and getting information from one place to another. Forums were around way before MySpace. These concepts aren’t new they’ve just been implemented in a way that makes it easier for people to connect.

In real life, the more social someone is the more friends they have. The more connected and active you are in your community the more popular you are.

When thinking about search and how to get traffic to your site, the answer is simple … just be more social. Find people who share your interests on Twitter, reply to them and start a conversation. Find blogs that discuss some of the same things you do and comment on them, linking to your blog (with your name, not keywords). Post interesting and relevant content, often. Be active inside forums targeted at your subject of choice. Link to other bloggers from your site, trust me they’ll notice.

Search was originally strictly about content. Google changed that up and realized backlinks are a better indication of what a site is about and not the actual content contained within the site. But lets think about what exactly Goolge has in it’s database … EVERYTHING. They have link data, on-page site data, RSS feed data, email data, browsing history (via their toolbar and web history) and the list goes on and on. One of things we know Google takes into account when ranking content is freshness. It looks for when content on a page was last updated, and the newer, more active pages get ranked better than less active ones (considering everything else is equal). So, it’s not that far of a stretch to think that the more active a website is everywhere on the Internet, the better it will rank considering those places it’s active are relevant to the content it’s targeting, links or no links.

I guess what I’m trying to say is just get out there! Be social in a relevant context (in a way Google can index it) and a nice side effect will be improved rankings and more traffic.