Despite email and social media being the two leading areas where businesses plan to increase their spend in 2010, and with 69% of businesses planning to integrate the two, there is very little information out there on how they measure up, let alone interact with one another.

Being the statistics-obsessed folks we are, we decided to get our hands dirty with Google Analytics and study the relationships that our site has with Twitter, Facebook and our newsletters. Along the way, we’ll also touch on some of the aspects of social media that aren’t so easy to measure.

Lets compare email and social media’s role:

As traffic-driving tools
As a means to attract new visitors to your site
As engagement-drivers

Using email and social media to drive traffic to your site

Depending on how much effort you put into your monthly newsletter or social media efforts, the capacity for each channel to drive traffic to your site can be quite variable. We found that a whole month of Facebook updates and tweets drives roughly half as much traffic to our site as our monthly newsletter does over the same period, meaning that the social media crowd (roughly 9% of this combined audience) generated 30% of resulting traffic from Facebook, Twitter and email:

That said, it is difficult to separate follower traffic from what’s generated by retweets – being one of the very cool advantages of using Twitter. Another intangible is the propagation of fan page content and recommendations to Facebook feeds and pages – the traffic generated from this can’t be easily coupled to the fans you have.

Unlike Twitter and Facebook, email’s capacity to drive traffic has a long tail. Whereas the traffic from Twitter and Facebook comes in bursts lasting as long as it takes for the message to fall off the bottom of the feed (2-3 days), email continues to collect clicks and opens for days (if not weeks) to come. Using the example of our November newsletter, the proceeding 3 weeks drove as much traffic to the site as the first 48 hours after the send. In fact, we still received an outstanding 1,456 clicks through to our site from the newsletter in the third week!

What does this tell us?

• Nurturing even a modest social media community can generate considerable traffic – on average, these followers and fans tend be more responsive than email subscribers, too. Is it because of the participatory nature of social media?
• Email has a very long tail, so consider the timeliness of your message. If a subscriber returns to your email three weeks later, will they still want to click-through?

Using email and social media to attract new visitors to your site

Now that we’ve looked at the number of site visitors received from email and social media sources respectively, lets look at how many of these people had either never visited our site before, or haven’t dropped by in a long time. The results were surprising:

6% of email subscribers who had received our newsletter and consequently clicked through had not visited since March, 2009 (when we made significant changes to our Google Analytics tracking). A lesser percentage of new visits came from Twitter and Facebook respectively. Although these figures may not be indicative of genuinely “new” visits, they do show that a considerable number of subscribers, followers and fans had not visited our site in at least 8 months (if at all). Instead of unsubscribing or unfollowing, they simply hung around, then finally took action on a relevant tweet or newsletter.

What does this tell us?
Email is just as relevant a channel as social media for initiating a relationship and introducing new or lapsed visitors to your content. If you provide a more ways to connect to your brand, you may find that a significant part of your audience may be in touch with you via email or following your tweets, but never actually viewed your site!
Even if an email subscriber hasn’t responded to your email newsletter in the last few months, don’t dump them – segments of your list may be simply waiting for the right offer to come along.

Using email and social media to drive engagement
Once all these visitors arrive via email and social media channels, what do they do? We tallied the average number of pages each visitor went to after arriving at our site and found that on average, Facebook fans visited 1.7 pages more than email subscribers and 2.79 pages more than Twitter followers:

This also reflects what seems to be a loose relationship between the percentage of new site visitors and their willingness to explore a site. Also, from our own link-sharing experience on Twitter, it’s indicative of a tendency to click a link in a tweet in order to snappily read a single article, in opposition to the leisurely site experience that Facebook promotes.

What does this tell us?

• Consider your landing pages and extended site experience – if it takes more than three pages to achieve a goal, you may have lost most of your Twitter visitors and certainly a lot of your email subscribers along the way.

We’re all in this together

Email, social media and your content should be viewed as a collaborative effort. When you integrate your channels (eg. Add an email signup form to Facebook, or links in your newsletter to your Twitter page), any one of your subscribers can be interacting with you across half a dozen social networking sites, plus receive your tweets and email newsletters on a regular basis. To say one channel is more successful than the other is misleading, when they ultimately flow into one another to create, in marketing speak, what is a multi-touch brand experience.

About this data
Email, Twitter and Facebook were chosen for this comparison as all three channels leverage the same content from our blog and gallery. Data was collected using Google Analytics over a one month period.

We’d love to know how you combine email and social media. Do you regularly use Twitter to promote your newsletter? Has your email resulted in more Facebook fans? Let us know about your experience in the comments below.

Here’s a quick preview of how it looks on an iPhone.

A focus on reporting

When deciding what functionality to include in the mobile version, we’ve been keeping a close eye on our customers. It turns out that the most popular section of your account accessed by a mobile device is campaign reporting, so that’s where we focused our efforts. More than 95% of all mobile visitors also come in on an iPod or iPhone variant, so we put a lot of work into making sure the experience was perfect on these devices in particular. It’s a really nice way to get the latest stats on a campaign you’ve sent in a couple of thumb presses.

Launch it

One great thing about the iPhone is that you can launch web applications just like a traditional app you’ve bought from the App Store. By heading into your account with Safari and adding it to your Home screen, you have a dedicated button that will load your latest reports with a single click. We even provide a nice icon and loading screen while the latest stats are downloading.

There is lots of cool technology under the hood of our mobile version, and I’ll be sure to share some of the more interesting details in a future post.

Easy switching

While the mobile version is all about your campaign reports right now, you can still switch to the full version and access all our functionality with a single click. At the footer of every page is a link to switch to the corresponding page in the full version of the app. We’ll automatically switch you back to the mobile version the next time you log in.

If you’re using this; please let us know what you think

View it over at vimeo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdRkdvKy5WI

Well lucky you

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjN5avRvApk

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Twitter Glossary

Twitter has started posting definitions of common Twitter terms on your profile page, beneath your picture. Note: If a term is classed as a “phone command”, it will only work from your phone. Your web tweets will go on functioning the same way. For anything that isn’t on this list, you can go to Twittonary.com, type your term in, and get a definition instantly. # sign The hash sign is used to mark a word as a keyword, which denotes a “hashtag”. More on hashtags further down the list. @ reply The @ sign is used to indicate that you are replying to a specific username. For example, if DickCheney tweets a question about font tags, you will reply with @reply DickCheney “nobody uses font tags anymore, try CSS” or something of the sort. Remember that when you use @reply it is visible to everyone – for private communications use a direct message. 140 character limit Twitter messages are meant to be short. Most people don’t even go up to the 140 character limit when posting a tweet. This is the reason for utilities like URL snippers, which we’ll get to. Block The act of blocking a particular user name from following your tweets. You block someone by clicking on their profile and choosing “Block” on the right sidebar. d USERNAME Updating Tweets from a Mobile Device: You can send tweets from any mobile device using text messaging. Text “d YOURUSERNAME” and your tweet and send it to 40404, Twitter’s text message number. Direct Messages Direct Messages are sent from twitter by entering d RECIPIENTUSERNAME Text of Message. DM This stands for direct message, which is the Twitter equivalent to e-mail. You may only send direct messages to those following you. To do so, click on “Direct Message” on their profile and type out your message, again only up to 140 characters. Automatic direct messages can be set up to thank someone for following you using a free service such as TweetLater. Keep in mind that you cannot send Direct Messages to people that are not following you, even if you are following them. This is Twitter’s built-in spam protection. Drunktwittering Drunk dialing on Twitter. Dweet Related to above, Tweet sent while drunk. Failwhale The whale logo that pops up when the Twitter service crashes. FAV You can favourite a tweet by typing FAV in all caps plus their username. This will automatically favourite the last tweet from that user. Feed Your posts on Twitter are commonly referred to as your “Twitter feed”, or “timeline”. FOLLOW username Phone command. This command sends the message that you want to follow a specific user on Twitter. Followers People who follow your updates. Friendapalooza A round of friending on Twitter. Geotwitter Type it in to get the geolocation of the most recent tweets. GET username Retrieves the most recent tweet from that user. Hashtags Hashtags, such as #BSG for “Battlestar Galactica”, denote groupings on Twitter for popular, commonly referenced items. You can follow updates on hashtags in real time at Hashtags.org They were developed as a means to create groupings on Twitter. In order to have hashtags tracked, start following @hashtags on Twitter. It will follow you automatically and your use of hashtags will be tracked. Hashtags became popular during the San Diego fire, when Nate Ritter used the hashtag #sandiegofire to chronicle his updates of the event. Since then they have been used to track specific events in real time on a regular basis. INVITE phonenumber This will send a Twitter invite to a mobile phone. LEAVE username Phone command. Sends the message that you wish to stop following a certain user. Locking Your Profile You can “lock” your profile so that only friends can see your updates by scrolling down to the bottom of your “Settings” tab on the Twitter website and clicking the box beside “Protect My Updates”. This may deprive you of followers who would have otherwise followed you based on keywords in your posts and isn’t advised for general use. You would only want this if you wanted to use Twitter, but need to avoid public communication for a specific reason. Even celebrities have public profiles on Twitter. Microblog Twitter is a microblogging platform. A shorter and usually more immediate version of a blog. mistweet Similar to “mistell”, a term coined by gamers, a mistweet is a tweet that you will regret. You can delete your tweets on your profile page, but everyone on your follow list will still have seen it when it was posted. NUDGE username Reminds one of your friends to update. off-Twitter A variant of “offline”, usually used when someone wants to share something with someone privately. OFF Phone command. Turns all notifications to your phone off. OFF username Phone command. Turns all notifications to your phone from a certain user off. ON Phone command. Turns all notifications to your phone on. ON username Phone command. Turns all notifications to your phone from a certain user on. Public Timeline The timeline of all public Tweets. Seen here. ReporTwitters Reporters publishing tweets in conjunction with their articles or broadcasts. RT/Retweeting This stands for retweeting, the process whereby you repost someone else’s Twitter post on your feed. The proper form for this is: RT #usernameyouarerequotingfrom “text of the retweet”. You are specifying that it is a retweet and putting in the full username so others on your list can choose to follow them if they like it. Search Go to search.twitter.com to search tweets for a specific keyword. Also, http://twitter.com/invitations/find_on_twitter will allow you to search by name. STATS This is a command that returns how many people you are following, how many people are following you, and which words you are tracking. TinyURL Name of the most popular URL snipping service which trims URL lengths to allow for inclusion in twitter messages. Located at tinyurl.com. There are others out there but this is the most commonly used one. Twactor Someone who impersonates another person on Twitter. Twittcrastination Using Twitter to procrastinate. Twadd The act of adding someone as your friend. Twaffic Traffic on Twitter. Twaggle A bunch of followers. Twaigslist To sell something via Twitter. Twaiting Twittering while waiting for something. Tweeps/Tweeples A cluster of friends on Twitter. Frequently used to address all of your followers at once, e.g.”Morning, Tweeples!”. Tweet-back Bringing a previous tweet back into the current conversation. Tweeter A Twitter user. Tweeterbox Someone who Tweets too much. Tweetard Someone acting like an idiot on Twitter. Tweetheart Another way to refer to friends on Twitter. TweetIn A group of users agree on a set time to Twitter to each other. Tweets A collection of posts on Twitter. Twerminology Lingo used on Twitter. See this Glossary. Twhepard Twitter employee that restores your lost followers if you have lost them due to a technical glitch. Twhiner A Twitter user who posts a high number of negative items. Twike To ride a bicycle while Twittering. Don’t ask for a how-to. Twis A “dis” of a fellow Twitterer. Not a good idea since everything on Twitter is public. Twittectomy The act of unfollowing someone on Twitter. Twitterati The Twitter L33T. This is not a comprehensive list at all, but it is generally accepted that a member of the Twitterati has 30,000 or more followers. A very nice graphing of Twitterati networks is available here. Twitterbate This was meant to be a comprehensive list. Self-explanatory, but the mental images are disturbing. Twitterific Something awesome related to Twitter. Twittering To send a Twitter message. Twitteritas Ladies who use Twitter. Twitterject To insert your tweet in an ongoing conversation between other people on Twitter. Twitterlooing The act of Twittering from a bathroom. Twitterphoria What you feel when something good happens on Twitter, like being followed or retweeted. Twittermob Similar to a “flashmob”, this is a bunch of people who descend on an often ill-prepared location based on a Twitter message. Twitterstream The Twitter timeline, both your own and the public one. Twittfessional A confession made on Twitter. Twittosphere The community of Twitter users. Twittworking Networking with other Twitter users. Twoogle Twitter as the human version of Google, since you can post a question and get instant results. Twoops Sending a private message to Twitter by accident. Twoosh A full 140 character Twitter message. Twurvey A survey conducted over Twitter. Twype Typing a Twitter message. WHOIS username Gets profile information for a Twitter user. Don’t forget to…

What Twitter is in plain English.

Twitter – The Basics