How many times does your brand publish on Twitter in any single day? Two, three or four times? If so, you’re in line with many brands out there. Ahead of most, in fact. But unless your content is outstandingly creative or relevant and getting loads of retweet action, you’re probably also seeing little value.
As a rough guide, about 4% to 5% percent of your followers will see any given tweet that you publish.
So let’s say you have 2000 followers; each tweet will have a reach of approximately 80 people. If you tweet three times per day, you’re reaching only 240 people. And that’s assuming there’s no crossover between those three audiences, which is unlikely.
Then you need to consider what ‘reach’ actually means. In this instance, I’m using it to refer to ‘impressions’, which is Twitter’s standard measurement. And an impression is hugely passive. All it means is that your tweet appeared on someone’s screen when they were scrolling through their timeline. It doesn’t mean they read or even noticed your tweet.
In a non-scientific experiment I conducted a couple of years ago, my estimate of the number of people who actually read any given tweet is more like 2.5%. So applying that to your 2000 followers and three tweets means you’re really only being seen by less than 150 people per day.
Think that’s bad? It gets worse, I’m afraid.
When you @reply to someone without using a character before the @ sign, you’re limiting your reach still further. Let’s say I see a tweet that I want to respond to. Maybe it’s a customer sending me a lovely product image. If I reply “@XYZ thanks for sending that. Glad you love it!”, the only people who can see that tweet are me, @XYZ and anyone who happens to follow both of us. So, a handful.
For these reasons and others it’s important to be very active on Twitter if you want to be successful with it.
In my next post I’ll show you how you can increase your Twitter reach significantly with minimal additional effort.
By Paul Sutton, @thepaulsutton
