Here's a spamming PR agency blanket tweeting anyone they think could get them coverage.
By now, if you're a Twitter user, there's a good chance you've seen Twitter's new list functionality.
Here are some ways your brand can use Twitter's new on-site functionality:
- Segment and grow your local customer base: If you're a global brand with a local -- or even hyperlocal -- customer base, enable your consumers to connect with each other through you. For instance, a world-famous chain of coffee bars could set up meetup groups through local lists, and when it's ready to execute on some local programs, it already has its local influencers lined up.
Reference list for who's really paying attention to you: Your brand may have thousands upon thousands of Twitter followers, but are they really paying attention?
- Thank and promote people who talk to you: If you're a Twitter user, there's a good chance you know about the #FollowFriday meme. When participating in #FollowFriday, you may want to recognize so many users, you'll write multiple posts that flood your Twitterstream.
Twitter lists enable brand accounts to eschew these pseudo-spammy posts. Not only can a brand create a "List of the Week" for people it interacted with, but these people can immediately connect with each other through your list, and then they can explore other lists.
- Promote your customer service department: Many companies are recognizing the power Twitter has to help the customer service department. As a result, your brand may have one -- or several -- touchpoints on the Twittersphere.
Promote them! Create a list that includes all of your customer service-related employees. When a follower DMs you with an issue, complaint or compliment, it helps to send them to several people, instead of one, to handle their issue.
Think of a customer service-centric list as another way to ease your Twitter workflow.
- Monitor for negative mentions through list inclusion: The social media crowd is quite fickle: If a consumer has a positive brand experience, they'll shout it from the mountains.
The same is true with negative brand experiences: A Twitter user may dislike you so much, they add your brand to a negative list.
Use your Twitter lists not only to highlight the positive, but keep an eye out for inclusion on negative lists. If you can direct users to your (newly created) customer service list, or if there's a way for your brand to improve your product -- the actual product or Twitter stream -- in any way, do it.
Remember that your detractors are part of your brand, whether you like it or not, but every complaint you receive is an opportunity.
Study the Twitter lists you're on. Look at the other Twitter accounts that are listed with yours. If you find your brand is only on one type of list, your Twitter presence may be one-dimensional. (This is not necessarily a bad thing -- your followers may prefer you stay on topic -- but it may keep you from bringing in new followers.)
- Think about your brand differently: When I examined my personal Twitter lists, I started to see how other people -- including many folks I have never met before -- categorize what I offer through social media.
Here's a screen capture of some of the lists I'm on:
Not only am I a Weber Shandwick employee, but I'm a public speaker, a media futurist, a "top influencer" of sorts, a friend, a community builder, an entrepreneur, a buddy, a journalist, a person who's "full of awesome", a cigar aficionado and a Chicagoan.At the very least, there's a good chance you'll find some good presentation fodder. If you take the lists seriously, you'll gain real insight into how people really think about your brand.
And it won't cost a dime.
In terms of traffic, Twitter is becoming a hybrid of Digg (of some years back) and StumbleUpon. By Digg I mean that thousands of blogs are now including “Tweet this” buttons (just like they were with “Digg It” buttons) and like StumbleUpon, Twitter has the ability to send thousands of visitors in a short period of time.
While getting a huge amount of retweets is one way to get twitter eyeballs on your content, there is another way. And that way, is by having a lot of followers on your account. My personal account only has around 10,000 followers but I’ve had many days of 400+ visitors from the service.
Because I’m often referred to as “Mr. Analytics” I decided it would be interesting to dig further into the statistics of the top 100 users and see if there are any clear factors about what it takes to become a top user or who stands out among the many celebrities using the service.
Number of Followers
Now the reason top users are referred to as such is because of the number of followers that their account has. This is simply people who have clicked ‘follow’ on their profiles and subscribed to their updates. This is probably the only graph in the post that is going to follow a nice gradual direction:
- Most followers: 3,830,056 (@aplusk – Ashton Kutcher)
- Least followers: 1,236,521 (@samantharonson – Samantha Ronson)
- Average number of followers: 1,637,361
As you can see from the chart, there is a clear separation between the top 15 or so users and then the following 85 tend to have very similar numbers. Many of the top 100 positions change on a daily basis because the figures are so close.
Number of Friends
The number of friends section looks at how many people that these top users follow. For most accounts I see, people have around a 1:4 ratio. That means if they were followed by 100 people, they would probably be following around 25. As you will see for most of the top users though, that is far from the case:
- Most friends: 753,958 (@barackobama – Barack Obama)
- Least friends: 0 (@womensweardaily – Womens Wear Daily)
- Average number of friends: 39,754
Most of the top users follow so few accounts that you can barely see them on the chart. While the president of the United States follows more people back than anyone else, Zappos and Whole Foods follow the largest percentage of people that follow them.
Number of Updates
The number of updates is how many tweets each user has sent out. Some of these are automated through RSS feeds (such as @Nytimes) and others are personal tweets, such as Shaquille O’neill (@THE_REAL_SHAQ).
- Most updates: 37,297 (@Nytimes – New York Times)
- Least updates: 14 (@ashsimpsonwents – Ashlee Simpson Wentz)
- Average number of updates: 3,545
It must be nice to have over 1.7 million followers when you have only made 14 tweets. I guess that just shows how passionate Ashlee Simpson fans are. Close to her was Oprah, who with only 72 tweets, has 2.4 million followers. But hey, it’s Oprah!
Length of Membership
The longest person who has been on Twitter in the top 100 users is of course co founder Biz Stone who has been on the service for 44 months. Besides that, I thought it would be interesting to see how long (or short) the top users have been members of the service:
- Longest membership: 36 months (@Veronica – Veronica Belmont)
- Shortest membership: 7 months (@kimkardashian – Kim Kardashian, @ashsimpsonwentz – Ashlee Simpson, @peoplemag – People Magazine), @serenajwillians – Serena Williams)
- Average membership length: 18 months
As you can see, there is no clear correlation between length of time on the site and how many followers that you have. In fact, Ashton Kutcher has only been on the site for half of the average time and is 300,000 subscribers ahead of second place.
Type of Account
Finally, I thought it would be interesting to see how many of the Top 100 accounts were individuals, and how many of the top 100 accounts were some form of business. I expected there to be a lot more individuals than companies. I was right about this, but the two figures were closer than I thought:
- Number of people: 66
- Number of companies: 34
- Most popular person: Ashton Kutcher
- Most popular business: CNN Breaking News
In fourth place, CNN breaking news is by far the most popular non-individual on the service with a whopping 2.78million followers.
Summary
As you can probably tell, the top individuals are generally celebrities. They tend to be people who have acceled in areas of acting, music, or sports. For the few people who aren’t world-known celebrities, they tend to be well known in the tech industry. For example, @Veronica (Veronica Belmont) hosts a show via Revision 3 which was created by Digg founder, Kevin Rose.
All in all, the aim of this analysis was to simply look at the results and see what interesting factors popped up. I think I’ve managed to achieve that and I hope you enjoyed the post!
Not much new here but still Interesting stuff.
The analysis found that 54 percent of Fortune 100 companies were using Twitter to engage with their stakeholders, while 32 percent were using a blog and 29 percent were actively using a Facebook fan page.
Clever idea this. Get the early adopters going crazy for it which in turn empowers them to become advocates for the brand and at the same time extends the reach to places Microsoft may not be able to touch.
There's a lot of love for Channel 4's Come Dine with Me programme on Twitter. I first heard about this article over at Paid-Content which I tweeted earlier this morning.
Check the crazy amount of retweets, I couldnt fit them all on one screen grab!
CEO of Twitter, Evan Williams, plugged what's in store for Twitter, as reported by a CBS article. Williams cites a number of future innovations, including:
• A reputation system to validate users and pump up credibility.
• A tool that displays the location of the tweeter.
• Twitter groups and separate lists of followees.
• Improved searchability and organization of tweets.
Holy kaw! Read the full article.
by @noelleee
