Since metrics for the efficacy of social media marketing strategies have yet to develop, many businesses try to discern the success of their Twitter campaigns based on the number of followers they acquire. Marketers may need a new measurement system – a study from Hewlett Packard Social Labs entitled Influence and Passivity in Social Media reveals that the influence of content shared on Twitter has little correlation to the provider’s number of followers on the social site. The report suggests marketers should focus their energies on targeting active users in order to develop brand advocates on the platform.
HP Labs asserts that most people consider those Twitter users with the largest numbers of followers to be the most influential users by default. However, the study suggests that the branding power of Twitter lies not in simply passing information to followers, but also getting followers to pass it along. This not only potentially spreads the information to the retweeting party’s followers, but – importantly – it proves that the content has been read by the retweeting user. The study shows that the majority of Twitter’s passive users never see or choose to ignore the information shared with them.
According to the study, the average Twitter user retweets only one in 318 URLs tweeted by the individuals or organizations they follow. This indicates that the dissemination of information on the site often lies in the hands of a relatively small percent of very active users. As such, it’s more important for brands to find these highly active followers than it is for them to accumulate masses of potentially meaningless followers.
An important way to gain active followers is by being an active user. The HP study suggests Twitter’s most active users need to be consistently engaged in order for them to act on the content they are provided by those they follow. In light of this, brands may want to consider catering to active users with conversational tweets – a recent study from 360i shows that many Twitter users look to converse on the platform.
Marketers looking to engage active users in order to leverage them as brand advocates may be interested in the results of a report from Barracuda Labs. A section of the report entitled Twitter Friends and Tracking reveals that users with approximately 1,000 followers tend to be the most active tweeters, as opposed to those with more than 100,000 followers, whom marketers often misguidedly target.
