Most of us know something about how Twitter works. We follow someone. Hopefully they will follow us back. We type in something interesting every once in a while. We read what others are typing in. But what does it all mean?
As this is being written we are gathering responses in a Twitter poll from actual Twitterers. This poll attempts to gauge what users of Twitter expect from their time and energy. As of today the Twitter poll respondents believe Twitter should be used to:
1. Generally socialize and get connected 27%
2. Keep informed about a particular topic or interest 30%
3. Inform others about a particular topic or interest 19%
4. Promote a product or service I provide 24%
See poll results and add your two cents by clicking here.
From these responses we conclude that most people are not using Twitter to promote a product or service. If you are a business person, and since you are reading this you probably are, you may at first view this as bad news. But it is actually good news. Since less than a forth of the Twitterers are promoting a product or service, we conclude the market place is probably more open to a few doing just that.
Let’s illustrate this with an example of businesses at a trade show. If only the businesses at the trade show were the ones presenting, they would be focusing so much on promoting their own product or service that they may not be as interested in hearing about yours.
Of course you should Not come across as only being self promoting. You need to build relationships, offer value, entertain your followers, then every tenth tweet or so they may not mind a little self serving promotion.
This brings me to the point of this blog posting. How do you tell how effective you are on Twitter? Yes, you can create tracking url-s that tells you when you got a visit, lead, or sale from Twitter and that is the ultimate indicator. But how do you know how you rank with your followers as compared to other Twitterers? How effective are your tweets compared to the best on Twitter? A lack of knowledge here may make or break you.
One indicator of how you rank with your followers is your Retweet rank. A Retweet Rank is a representation of the number of times a user has been retweeted by others recently on twitter.
If you enter my Twitter ID of @steventhompson, I have a Retweet rank of 8,406 and a 94.2 percentile. This compares pretty good with Twitter ID @airductcleaner who has a retweet rank of 144,868 and a 0.0 percentile but not as well with Twitter ID @britneyspears who has a retweet rank of 1001 and a 99.31 percentile. As you can see the lower the rank number and the higher the percentile number the better.
If you rank low and have a higher percentile this is probably an indication that you may get away with a few more self promoting tweets. If you rank high with a lower percentile you may want to promote every 20 tweets or 30 tweets, of even more.
Go ahead and take the Twitter Poll. Then find out your Retweet Rank. You will then be positioned to do the optimal amount of self serving promotional Tweets.
Contact steve.thompson@siteedgeagency.com .
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Thank you for sharing your article. I still do not believe twitter will ever “make or break you.” The high percentages you mention have a lot to do with re-tweeting, but so what, people talk back and forth on the phone too, email, blogs, etc. I think all the hype about twitter can be very deceiving. I believe that it is simply one of the many internet tools (i.e., micro blogs, social networks, etc.) to integrate into a marketing program however, the high % stats value for common people do not mean as much as it does for celebrities. Thank you again for a very interesting and informative article on your thoughts on the potential effectiveness of twitter.
Left by Gloria on July 29th, 2009