Well, the rumors of Twitter’s life may be greatly exaggerated. I’ve been playing around with this social media thing for a few months. I joined Twitter and Facebook, sought out old friends and colleagues, etc. But I’ve been wondering, particularly with Twitter, whether anyone was really listening. Are we all standing in a big room yelling through megaphones at each other?
So here was my little experiment. I sent out a tweet yesterday at 12:30 EST to see how many people even see any given missive. Here was the text:
“Ever wonder what % of people read your tweets? An Experiment: If you read this, please reply or DM me with “Got it!” — i’ll tweet results”
The results were not promising. At the moment I sent out the tweet, I had 1,090 followers. Most of these people are interested in or work in the field of green business or environmentalism (I think). After a few hours, a grand total of 19 people responded…and none after that. That’s less than 2%.
Why such a ridiculously low response (I could send a direct mail package and do better)? A few interpretations:
1. I’m a wildly unpopular tweeter and people follow me out of pity, but have blocked all my tweets from bothering them.
2. Green-minded people are too busy enjoying the weather or hugging trees to check their Twitter feed.
3. I didn’t choose a good time to tweet. I figured lunch time on the east coast and during the business day for everywhere else was good. But maybe most people check at night.
4. People follow so many other people, that they only see a tiny fraction of the tweets that go by — only the ones they happen to see in the few minutes they check.
5. On a related note, people follow many others, but use TweetDeck or other software to truly follow a much smaller number.
While the first couple may be true, I’m leaning toward the latter explanations. People really pay attention to only a small number of people they follow, and nobody really knows who those are. But as this is one data point, I’d love it if a few of you out there ran the same experiment to see what response rate they get and got back to me.
So what should one do with this knowledge? One answer is to tweet a lot more so you reach more people throughout the day. But that’s sort of unappealing to manage and really unappealing for the few who do see most of your tweets. Another is to not worry too much about repeating yourself since so few see any one tweet. If you have something important to say or promote, maybe you post it a few times at different times of day. But that could also get annoying for your best followers.
I’m not sure what the answer is, but I’m thinking that expecting much from Twitter in the way of conversation, awareness building, or brand enhancement may be a mistake. I welcome your thoughts.
4 Responses
Great article, nice writing style! I’ve been thinking about this myself. Very interesting. I was on the move myself midday- trying to get to the beach-lol- been some unstable summer weather here making outdoor activites a little soggy to enjoy. I often check in AM and PM on twitter.
One reader pointed out that maybe people saw the Tweet but didn’t want to respond. I meant to mention that. Ok, so let’s double or even triple the number to allow for that. Is even 6% seeing any given tweet a good number for a medium that is about conversation, building buzz, etc.?
Also, if you’re thinking of twitter as a partial marketing channel, how ‘useful’ are followers that can’t even hit reply? will they be bothered to re-tweet something or even act in a larger way (buy something, act politically, spread the word, etc)?
It’s all an interesting new world of connecting…
Yes, twitter is a conversation but I sense there is a lot more listening going on than talking.
I’ve developed some significant professional relationships through twitter – it is not the number but the quality of those relationships, accessibility of the tweeple, and timeliness of the tweets that makes twitter a useful tool.
I definitely don’t DM very often, but I DO check out links and retweet content on a regular basis.
Re the request, some people may not have followed through on your request as it may have been perceived as an interruption to their existing conversations. Some tweeple focus only on specific conversations.
On a technical note, in order to DM you, I believe you have to have a mutual following. Since you only follow 58 people, that significantly reduces the ability of the 1,118 people you follow to DM you.
Just some thoughts …
The Twitter conversation takes a bit of work to make it work. You generally need to be constantly retweeting, posting links, and following more folks in order to make it “work”. I’m guessing that reasons #4 and #5 are why you didn’t receive a huge response.
One or two tweet a day doesn’t work. People do tend to filter out their tweets and aren’t always reading every one. I use Nambu to filter tweets into different categories and to lasso the 9,000 green people I am following…
Twitter is just one tool to get more interest in what you are offering along with the myriad of other social media tools; Facebook, Linked In, Digg, Reddit etc..