Dell makes $3 million dollars through Twitter; twitterati injure themselves patting own backs

I love the news this week from Dell that visitors driven to their website from their DellOutlet Twitter account have made $3 million in purchases.

 

To know this you have to be measuring your website with any of the standard products like Google Analytics or SiteCatalyst, and then specifically hunting for which feeders of traffic are most effective at driving sales.

 

For Dell, which had revenue of $12.3 billion in the first quarter, $3 million may not seem like much, until you consider that the DellOutlet channel can be run by one person (or less) and that twitter doesn't charge for accounts.

 

Suddenly the return on investment of tweeting makes a little more sense for an e-tailer.  Of course the key is in effective website measurement  Dell didn't just track direct tweets-to-sales, but tweets that brought visits that eventually resulted in sales.  This is crucial in an interconnected world where everyone uses an enormous mix of twitter, facebook, e-mail, or blogs.  Twitter may have brought them in initially, but then they may have returned directly to the site to purchase several days later.

 

Only if you're effectively measuring your website and where your traffic comes from, can you truly understand how to credit the sales and know what's working.  For more, see this NYT blog post.

Comments

[Cheap Dell Tower]

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