Ok, anyone who says Twitter is not effective for marketing nowadays flat out just doesn’t know how to use it effectively. But I have to admit, a 48% click through rate from non-followers even surprised me a bit.

I recently setup a test on our Twitter software Intwelligent to see how much traction I could get, meaning clicks back to my site, from people that were NOT following me.

The goals here were simple:

Results = A 48% Click Through Rate on the Link!

Here is how I did it.

First, I found a really great infographic someone did on how to determine social media ROI. Since they were encouraging people to share their graphic, I put it on my site and added my own language to introduce the graphic.

Second, I researched how many people where using the keyword term “social media ROI” on Twitters search tool, Search.Twitter.com to make sure I wasn’t going to be flooding my Twitter account with tweets. Generally, I only like to respond to about a max of 10 per day. I had to do a little work to filter out keywords I didn’t want to respond to, like “cookbook” and I just added a second which came on strong in the last few day since someone release a new tool for ROI.

With my blog post in place, and the keyword research done, I then turned to our Intwelligent tool and setup the campaign. I wrote 3 tweets I wanted to go out, each in a “hey did you see this as well” fashion. Below are images of each of these being used:

In the campaign for the software, I used a bitly.com link to track my results. Here they are in detail.

As you can see from the below screen shot of our software, it sent out 338 tweets responding to the keywords “Social Media ROI”.

And, as you can see from this bitly.com screen shot, so far this campaign has generated 162 clicks on the link.

If you divide 162 by 338, you get .479, rounded up, that is .48, otherwise known as 48%.

Now, in the land of email, a 48% click through rate is somewhat staggering. You have to really be doing a good job with your copy and have a super engaged list to come anywhere near this number.

I did this from Twitter, targeting people that AREN’T EVEN FOLLOWING ME AND HAVE NO IDEA WHO I AM (the use of caps here is to accentuate my total shock)!!!

I was completely floored by this number. And best of all, these are highly target people who went on to join my list at an optin rate of 17.9%

So, back to my original goals for this “experiment”, how long they each took to setup.