Tag Archives: Twitter Accounts

How many retweets do you need to get a new follower on Twitter?

July 15, 2014 by 123outsource
Categories: Analytics, Popular on Twitter, Semi-Popular | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

On my notary twitter, we have accumulated more than 8000 followers. They seem to be very passive. We get some clicks on our links, but not that many. We get a handful of retweets per day, but nothing amazing. I figured if the number of followers kept growing, that our retweets might grow too. It sort of works that way, but not exactly.

Passive growth is anyone’s dream in social media. Imagine creating a Twitter or Linked In account that just grows on its own? Our Notary Linked In actually does just grow on its own and the discussions on it are fantastic too! What I learned from my new travel Twitter account, is that retweets only help you if you get a lot of them.

Our Notary Twitter gets one to eight retweets per day. We can’t measure how that helps us since we are doing PPC advertising and a lot of interaction. But, on my travel Twitter account which is new, we are not interacting with existing members. We are just getting new members, and there is no PPC. We follow others, interact, and retweet. There is a lot of activity on the account, but since there is no PPC, it is easier to guestimate the realities of the retweets.

On my travel Twitter we get retweeted generally 20 to 40 times per day. That is a lot of retweets. Our growth rate is 10-20 people per day. The growth comes partly from the retweets, but more from the following, retweeting, and interacting. I would estimate that we might get about four new followers per day from the thirty average retweets per day. But, it is more complicated than that. The size of the accounts that retweet you matters too. If you get retweeted by someone with ten followers, it really doesn’t help. But, if someone with half a million followers retweets you, then you are in business.

I actually did get a comment retweeted by a guy with 400,000 followers. I was curious to see if that would help. We got a generous amount of new followers during the following twenty-four hours, but not higher than we usually get in a way that I would measure.

My official guess, based on experience, is that — if you get retweeted in a way that reaches 15,000 Twitter accounts, you might get a single new follower. If what I call a “weak interaction” gets retweeted, you might need 50,000 people to get it in order to get a single follower. The quality of the tweet, and the relevance of the followers factor into the equation. Basically, to sum it up, if you want your Twitter account to grow from retweets, you had better get a ton of them daily.

I make it a practice to follow only those who either follow me, have top notch content, or those who retweet others regularly. If they retweet others, they are likely to retweet me, and that is exactly what is happening!

Good good, analytics are confusing!

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Twitter analytics — click rates per 100,000 impressions
http://bpo.123outsource.net/2015/11/15/doing-some-twitter-analytics-click-rates-per-100000-impressions/

Learning to profile the accounts you follow on Twitter can triple your growth
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9 ways to assess the quality of your Twitter account and/or social media agency
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Active vs. Dormant followers on Twitter

September 27, 2013 by 123outsource
Categories: Analytics, Semi-Popular, Social Media | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Active vs. dormant followers on Twitter

I have five Twitter accounts and find them all to be very interesting. However, several are run by a manager who has a very definitive way of running her accounts. She targets users one by one who are relevant. This makes sense, but there is more that needs to be considered. After we have accumulated 3800 fans, only a handful of them interact with us or retweet us no matter how good our materials are.

I just started my own two Twitter accounts. Each one has a well defined audience. I do not target prospective users at all. I have a completely different way of attracting followers. One technique I use is to retweet from industry news, national news, and international news. That way I get interesting people to join my account. Those new folks might not be relevant to my niche, but they are the type that click the EXPAND link — which means that they are the type that retweet. You can not retweet without clicking the expand link. With my niche followers, even if they did retweet me, their followers are not in my niche, so the tweet would never go viral. However,

these followers who found me when I retweeted, are retweeters themselves, and they retweet me. My new Twitter accounts that have less than 100 followers are getting retweeted once per day which is more than I was getting with my old accounts after they hit 3000 followers. The only way to make it big on Twitter is to go viral, so attracting people who retweet is key. The next thing I do is to interact on large Twitter accounts. The relevancy and quality of the interaction determines whether I get retweeted or not. I use humor, and spend a lot of time refining how I convey my message. I’ll sum up my techniques below:

(1) Retweet from industry news, national, and international news. But, don’t retweet from each source more than once per week for maximum results. Remember, that retweeters are searching through those mediums looking for others who retweet — so they can FOLLOW them. Those retweeters are clicking the expand button on many tweets, so you only need to be on one per week.

(2) Interacting on large accounts, or relevant accounts. A small account in your niche is a place to interact regularly. But, large news sources or entertainers are good places to interact. By posting a really interesting response to a post they published — THEY will not retweet you, but their fans will. I get retweeted almost daily by this technique. You need to be very selective about what you respond to and how you respond. Humor works well, and insight works even better.

(3) Use crossover tweets? Tweet information that is industry specific for your niche, but ALSO is relatable to the public. I tweeted about cats who use google analytics. People loved this. It appealed to the laymen as well as hard core analytics guys! Crossover tweets get retweeted roughly 10x as much as a thoughtful industry specific tweet.

It is no crime to interact with people with mini-accounts of 100 people or less, but it is not a way to go viral. Those will end up being dormant followers who do nothing more than represent a number in your # of followers. Active followers can be caught through interacting and retweeting. Throw your herbal antibiotics away and go viral today!

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Social media & promoting your products with humor & information

May 28, 2013 by 123outsource
Categories: Marketing, Social Media | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Many companies are using social media these days. It is the “in thing” and for a reason. If hundreds of millions of people use it to make friends, find new business contacts, and compare products, it must be the place to be. But, do you use it correctly? Social media is hard. Even if you have a good staff member to run your Facebook and Twitter campaigns, the content needs to come from somewhere and that involves you in some way. I have personally been using various channels of social media since 2010, and it is hard to create an endless stream of great content. You have to figure out what people in your network like to read about, and write endlessly about it in a way that makes them want to interact.

THE GOLDEN RULE here is to tweet only 5% about promoting your products and the rest should be about stuff that the people on your network like to read about!

What I learned is that none of the books about social media that I have browsed through, or the magazine articles that I have read have helped me to become a better social media writer. But, there are things that I have done which helped.

(1) I read OTHER PEOPLE’S twitter profiles to see what they are doing. 99% of the content is rubbish, but there are a few accounts which have amazingly good content. I learn from what they are doing.

(2) Humor and wit makes your Twitter do better. Remember, put some Wit in your T-Wit-Ter. People are looking through hundreds or thousands of tweets and accounts when they visit their Twitter. If your tweets don’t stand out, then you will be overlooked.

(3) Juicy stories, gut wrenching tragedies, and drama will get people’s attention. Remember, most people are EMOTIONAL and not analytical. Just because I like to analyze, I should not assume that others do too, because only 1% of humans are the analytical type, but at least 70% are emotional. You get a bigger crowd by spending more time focusing on emotionally rousing topics. This works especially well on Facebook and blogs as you can get great responses.

(4) Quick Tips: Information is king on the web. But, do you tweet the type of information people want? The most popular type of information across the board — irrespective of what industry you are in would be QUICK TIPS that get big results. Hire someone who is an ace on the phone and watch your sales double. Spending an hour a day on analyisis can save you 40% of total costs in your business. The gas station at such and such a location sells gas at 40 cents below the average cost in your metro — save a mint. These are very vague samples I am giving, but this QUICK FIX information is popular. It is something people can understand, use, and benefit from quickly. People have little patience for having to actually learn something — quick and dirty is the key to popularity in information these days, especially in the A.D.D. generation.

(5) Rewrite the title of your blog in your tweets. You can tweet the same blog entry once every two days, each time with a different title. Since you have 140 characters to play with –that is much longer than a typical blog title length. You have a lot to work with. Take some of the juiciest content from the body of the blog, and make a twitter title out of it. Then, find some other content and do it again.

(6) Specifics sell. Although most people don’t like analytics, they like numbers that pop out at them. If I tell people we got 78% more clicks this month — nobody cares. But, when I tell them we got a MILLION clicks in the last 42 days on a particular site of mine — their eyes almost pop out. And this is true information. Understanding the emotional impact of information stated in different ways is paramount. Say the same thing three different ways and see which way more people react. Percentages require aptitude to comprehend, and most people don’t have aptitudes, but large numbers like a million is something even kids understand — and it presses on an emotional trigger point as well.

(7) The WOW factor. Anything that can make people say wow works. I’ll leave that up to you.

(8) Write 200 tweets and then look at them in perspective. If you just tweet whatever comes to mind, you are missing the birdhouse here. Twitter is not about tweeting anything. It is about gaining attention and losing it. A single bad tweet can lose followers and sour people who will still follow you. Go through your proposed list of tweets and peck at them a bit. See which ones to cut from your list because they won’t fly up to speed. Find others that will ruffle people’s feathers the wrong way and cut those. Organize your tweets in order of how effective they will be for gaining (or losing) followers and test them out. When I look at my last month’s tweets, I see a bunch that make me say wow, and a few others that make me ask, “Why did I publish that?”.

(9) Promoting your products. People use social media to promote their brand. But, most companies miss the point. They tweet self-promoting boring stuff that nobody will want to follow. Nobody will want to retweet their stuff either. Not rubbish, but boring. You need a ratio of stuff that your followers want to here compared to self-promotion. I suggest 20 tweets about quick tips, infromation, stories, etc., for every 1 tweet about what you are selling. That way you keep people interested. I am quickly turned off by self-promoting Twitter acounts. Boring and uninspiring.

Improper tagging habits have cost me thousands!

September 23, 2010 by 123outsource
Categories: Social Media | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

After four years, I came to a realization. Improper tagging habits have cost me thousands!

I have been involved in social media for four years. I hired an outside firm to help me with my Twitter, Facebook, Linked In, and other social media tasks. I do my own blogging, and enjoy it thoroughly. I do it myself because others can’t do it. Others can’t think of interesting ideas and write about them. Professional bloggers want to charge an arm and a leg, yet can’t deliver consistent good results. How sad!

After several years, I wanted to become smarter about social media, so I created my own twitter account that only I would have access to. I wanted to experiment with different types of tweets and see what worked. When I give tweets to the marketing firm that handles my Twitter, I have to give the tweets to them weeks before those tweets will be published. So, there is a huge delay in seeing what works, what doesn’t, and why! I typically will give them 80 tweets all at once labeled, “May 2014 Outsourcing Tweets” and arrange them by the day.” This system works well for the operators who input my tweets into the system. But, my personal Twitter lets me get results right away.

I can tweet the same four variations of the same tweet and see which one is most popular. I can also experiment with a variety of different tags and see which one helps the most! After four years of social media involvement, I am finally beginning to understand that my tagging strategy has been horrible. The reason why is that I never got immediate feedback from my experiments. Now, I’m able to get at least double the retweets, favorites, and interactions for each tweet simply due to my optimized tagging strategy.

I learned a lot about tags on Google. You can look up tags for specific industries, try them all out, and see which get you a better following. For the travel industry, the normal tags are #travel and #traveltip, but #ttot and #tbex, #lp, #nomnom for foodie topics, #traveltuesday and a few others worked well. You can look up tags yourself and find out what works. If you get retweeted from someone whofound you on a particular tag search result on Twitter, you might be able to maintain a presence there for a longer period of time, which could help you gain more followers!

One of my biggest problems with Twitter has nothing to do with Twitter. Two of my twitter accounts are in niche markets. The audience for my services are very small, especially since in those two markets, but followers don’t seem to like Twitter (not sure why.) The only way to get followers is to reach out into larger markets. I run an outsourcing twitter for example. There are very few active members in that industry on Twitter. But, by using more general business tags like #business, #marketing, #management, #motivation, etc., I am able to get seen, at least for a few minutes on keyword search results on Twitter, and that has gotten me a lot of retweets! Obviously, don’t use tags recklessly, the tag has to fit the tweet, otherwise you won’t get retweeted on the search results for that tag. But, experiment because you don’t know who is watching the search results.

There are internet “trolls” who sit and watch twitter search result feeds all day long. Some of them might like you and might retweet you regularly — it is a very personal thing. Even if your tweet doesn’t exactly match the tag, if the trolls hold you in high regard, they will retweet you. I sometimes tweet about travel topics and get retweeted by #foodie types. Food and travel are related topics that go together, but are not the same. People who travel typically like to enjoy some good street food, or an unusual gourmet restaurant. So, don’t prejudge – experiment with tags, and have your employees do the same. Make sure your employees document their results so you can see what type of results they are getting.