Twitter: Quality vs Quantity 24th Mar 2010
For geeks like me, Twitter is pretty much now a part of my daily life. TweetDeck (which recently replaced Tweetie as my favourite) stays running on my Mac constantly. It has become (for me, anyway) a rolling message-board with updates from my friends, colleagues, journalists and news sites, as well as the various bloggers who I follow. I also follow some celebrities who tweet, including director Kevin Smith, who actually chatted to me about the pitfalls of cinematography last week.
Besides having my own Twitter account, I also manage the Twitter accounts for various clients. Potential clients are often surprised when they ask me to write a digital proposal for them and I actually tell them that they don't need a Twitter account. Often, potential clients have heard about Twitter and the like in the press and want to take advantage of it to win some business and get some attention for them. Of course, it's never as simple as that, and as much as many digital agencies harp on about what a brilliant tool it is, at the end of the day any campaign is going to be measured against the sales - or at least enquiries - that it generates for the business.
But in the absence of hard financial figures to prove its effectiveness, many agencies and clients go for other metrics. On Twitter, this usually means Followers and Retweets. When a business sets up a new account the first step is to usually find a list on Listorious and add as many relevant Tweeters as possible, in the hope that they'll follow them back. Then ongoing activity involves doing the same over and over again so that the account's follower number creeps up.
The higher the Follower account the better, right? Well, no. Most people that follow you back will be doing so because they either just follow everyone back as a rule of thumb or because their account is set up to do so. People like this end up with thousands of people who they follow, and they either get so many tweets that they are likely to miss yours, or don't even read their tweets at all. How much business is this going to generate? None.
The Followers a business wants to gather are ones who are going to be genuinely interested in either what the business sells, or finding out what the business has to say. Just ten relevant followers is going to beat a thousand irrelevant ones in sales leads alone. This is a line I use a lot when talking to clients who are trying to understand the business benefits of Twitter having set one up themselves and not had any enquiries from it because they've not been using it properly.
Mass following isn't necessarily a bad thing, but if you don't look appealing to the 'real' people that you add, then they aren't going to follow you back, and if no-one follows you back, then your profile makes you look like a spammer because your ratio of followers to following is leaning heavily towards 'following'. Therefore the most reliable way to build followers is organically, but it's also the slowest way. By 'organically', I mean that Twitterers will follow you because they've seen your profile and they like it, and actually want to follow what you're tweeting about.
So how do you make your profile appealing? And how are people going to find you in the first place?
Firstly, a business needs to be putting out tweets which are interesting. Many 'failed' business profiles just tweet about their products. Some even just repeat the same message over and over again! Of course, tweeting about your products is in many cases a very good idea, but people are on Twitter to read things which interest them, not get a sales pitch thrown at them. Brands like Firebox and Lush use Twitter successfully to notify followers about new products or special offers on their sites, but these are 'impulse' consumer brands, so this technique isn't universal. Toyota's Head of PR in the UK uses his Twitter account to discuss the latest developments in the brand as well as casually chat to followers, he also uses it to develop relationships with journalists. This came in very handy indeed when Toyota was faced with the recall over braking faults, as his direct interaction with people through his Twitter account won a lot of respect back for the brand.
Engaging with fellow Twitterers is an important way of building followers, but very time intensive. It's also more likely to work if the account is a personal one rather than one in the name of the brand. Friendly chitchat which isn't work related makes a representative of a brand of business approachable and respectable - provided the banter is respectable, of course! A Twitter account for the brand itself (see @Google) should stick to work related tweets, but approaching things in a non-sales pitch manner. This can even work when the tweet is honest about plugging a product: 'Did we mention we sell trainers too? :-)'
A good way to pick up followers is by tweeting about relevant topics which people are going to find and decide to follow you as a result. If you're a clothes retailer, then tweeting interesting articles relating to the fashion industry which your followers will find interesting makes sense. A Twitter account will pick up followers this way, often either because your Tweet will get re-tweeted by your followers to their followers, or because the tweet will contain phrases that other people are searching for and are interested in. It makes sense that if you're a business in the stem cell industry, then tweeting about news stories relating to stem cells is going to win you followers who are searching for tweets relating to stem cells.
Of course, every industry or topic is different, and finding the right balance of quantity versus quality is always going to be difficult. That's where signing us at STAN up becomes a very good idea :-)
So Twitter is a useful tool for many businesses, but it's not the right tool for everyone, and it's not about quantity of tweets or followers. It's more about striking a balance, and using Twitter as a two-way communication channel, rather than just shouting and screaming about your brand.
And hey, if you're interested in getting to know how you can benefit from putting your business out into the social networking world, then we're the people to call. We're not going to sell you something which won't benefit your brand, so expect some good honest feedback from us.
Follow Alex on Twitter: lexplex_