What indicates Twitter success? Followers? Retweets? Conversations? On Twitter, these are elements of popularity.
If you’re using Twitter to market your product or service, real success is measured in conversions — the number of people who become customers, or who bring customers to you. If you’re using Twitter to research your industry or a particular subject, real success is measured in the number of reliable sources you find, and your ability to converse with them about topics that are important to you. In either case, in order to achieve success, you definitely need followers, retweets and conversations. You need to be popular!
When I want the latest data about the way people use Twitter, one of the people whose advice I take seriously is Dan “the social media scientist” Zarrella. Last week, Dan gave a webinar about his latest findings for Twitter, Facebook, blogging and email marketing. He made some interesting points about Twitter, which I will discuss today.
1. The people who are followed most on Twitter are not the most conversational. They’re the ones who share the most links. People who include links in 60 – 80% of their tweets are retweeted the most. The lower the percentage of linky tweets you make, the less you are retweeted.
Caveat by Angelique: If every single one of your links goes to your products or place of business, you won’t get many retweets, because no one will follow your account in the first place.
2. The absolute best time of day to tweet something you’d like to be shared in North America is 4:30pmET weekdays, with 4:30 – 6:30pmET being a good time range. Why eastern time, rather than “in any time zone”? Guess where most of the US and Canadian population lives?
Note by Angelique: It’s tempting to conclude that if you want the most amount of retweets from people in California, you should tweet between 4:30 – 6:30pm pacific time, but no one has tested this! The “golden time” for the west coast might be different. If you have stats about this, please share them!
3. The absolute best days to tweet for retweets are Saturday and Sunday. I hope this is self-explanatory.
4. Note that Dan has no statistics about the number of followers relative to the number of retweets and conversions. I don’t actually know why he’s never reported anything about this, but I suspect it’s because there’s no correlation. In other words, having a ton of followers does not guarantee you a ton of retweets.
BONUS ADVICE by Angelique: If you want to increase the number of conversations you have on Twitter, participate in Twitter chats, and then continue to converse with the people you meet there during the week.
Wonder if this advice will work for you? Why not give it a try? Add (or subtract) tweets with links to the tweets you send, and be sure to send out some tweets during the “golden” times and days. See if you start to reach some of your goals, and then let me know how you did in the comments below!
Have questions or comments? Please add them below!
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I’ll re-send a tweet about my new blog post around 5 today and see what happens :)
Good info AF!
These are great tips on becoming popular. Talking to people is definitely up there as an important tip! One caveat I would add tho. I don’t think people should be very rigid with their times to Tweet. Change it up. If you want to share an interesting thought, Tweet it. Don’t look at your watch and say oh its past 4:30, I should wait until tomorrow. Different audiences are on at different times and days. For example, you mention most Tweets and RTs are on weekends; however, I’m rarely online on weekends (although my girlfriend will disagree – so I guess I’m relatively rarely online). So if someone is trying to build a following and saving all the best stuff for the weekends, I’m left with the bones! Share, talk, and be natural are great advice!