Professional Tweeter

As a part of my freelance work (which has been mostly writing website content and other marketing material), I’ve recently begun ghost writing social media campaigns. I was reluctant to get into it, because I see myself as a writer, not a professional tweeter, but I have to say I’m really loving it.

I’m thinking of expanding my self-promotion on this front by revising my website with a new page to advertise my services, but to do that I feel I need to be able to quantify what a good social media campaign does for a client. Right now the vibe I get out there in the business world is that companies feel they need a social media presence because they “just do.” A lot of them, however, don’t want to deal with stepping into this new way of promoting their endeavors. It seems that most of them are much happier to pay someone to manage it for them.

So my challenge is to make a good argument as to why they need me. More than “just because.” And I think I’ve discovered a new tool I can use to support my personal pitch. I recently signed up for Hootsuite to streamline all the Twitter and Facebook accounts I manage, and they have a function where you can create a report about how many people click through to your site as a result of your Tweets/posts. If I can create a few of these (using my current clients, anonymously of course) I can at least argue that my work brings eyeballs to a website.

The question then becomes: how do I quantify increased profits resulting from that increased web traffic, particularly when dealing in service industries, not online retailers. I need to do more research on this. It’s something I’m very curious about. If anyone out there know a good source for info on this, tweet me.