A Little Bird Told Me
Twitter’s new analytics dashboard helps prove that better tweets stem from a few best practices.
“What makes a successful tweet?”
This is a question that gets asked all the time, from the board room to the living room. As a matter of course, my colleagues and I spend a lot of time thinking about how to answer it.
Fortunately, we’ve got some new data to help us out.
Last week, Twitter announced the release of an updated analytics dashboard for verified users and Twitter Advertising accounts. But you don’t actually have to spend any marketing budget (or possess that precious checkmark) to access them — anyone with a Twitter account can look at the data, so long as they set up an account.
It’s well worth doing so. The previous iteration of Twitter’s dashboard only included basic (and, frankly, meaningless when considered in isolation) data like the number of replies, clicks, favorites, and retweets. But the new dashboard is more expansive, offering information on impressions, user profile views, detail expands, forwards, hashtag clicks — metrics that can really give you a good idea of how impactful your tweeting really is.
Looking at my account, I came to a conclusion that I tried hard not to simply assume was true: good tweets are the result of a few simple practices.
Know your audience.
I tweet a lot about beer. This makes sense — in my spare time, I freelance about beer for local publications and spend time nerding out at beer bars and bottle shares with other local aficionados. While it’s not the best thing for my liver, my tweets about drinking lots of beer are a wonderful thing for my Twitter account.
Twitter’s analytics dashboard can tell anyone the five most unique interests of their followers. Here’s mine:
While merely living in the nation’s capital ensures me a healthy proportion of followers who are interested in politics and elections, my followers clearly want to know about beer, how beer pairs with food, and where the newest bars are. So, I tweet about it. A lot. It would be silly not to.
A successful tweet adds something valuable.
As I was writing this post, I pulled down the performance of all 2,162 tweets I’d sent since October 1, 2013 — another handy feature of the new dashboard. I then segmented out a random sample of 200 tweets of the following: tweets that contained just text and tweets that had something else: a hyperlink to an article, a YouTube clip, an Instagram photo, something that brought a dish to the digital potluck.
Generally, people are more willing to engage when you offer them something to engage with. On the whole, I’ve averaged just under a 2% engagement rate. (Hey, I’m just a guy tweeting about beer and soccer, often sloppily.) But the tweets that brought something to the table achieved more than double that engagement (4.3%); the tweets that didn’t performed below that average (1.8%).
The lesson: you may be very smart, and you may know a lot about a specific subject matter, and you may fancy yourself the world’s great undiscovered pundit. But those who share something with the digital world in their tweets will be far more successful those who simply pontificate.
Your best tweet may very well be someone else’s.
Like most of the world, I was obsessed with watching this summer’s World Cup — especially when the United States took the field. It’s not surprising that my most successful tweet during the last few weeks came at the conclusion of a very tense match during that tournament.
This one tweet was seen 11,685 times, garnered 2,042 media clicks, and pulled down a 22.7% engagement rate, which is some Buzzfeed-type social media ninja work.
It’s also not my tweet.
And that’s okay! Twitter is designed for people to recycle other people’s content. It’s built on an assumption that information must travel. As long as you follow the etiquette, sharing other people’s content is not only a way for you to build an audience, it’s precisely what the medium was built to do.
Live-tweet with care.
Speaking of the World Cup: It’s a big event. So, clearly, the world will stand to benefit from live-tweeting every second of the proceedings, yes?
Sadly, no. As much as you might think the tweetosphere needs you to share things like this:
I’ll admit.
It really, really doesn’t. During the thrilling match between the U.S. and Portugal, when it’s likely that your entire timeline was filled with tweets like the one above, I sent out 12 tweets that got zero engagement. None! I might as well have shouted these things into a well in the middle of an abandoned forest. (Of course, I regret nothing; it was a very emotional moment.)
Everyone loves touting the “second screen experience”— you can barely get through something like the Super Bowl, or the Oscars, or a big television season finale without actively getting involved in the experience. It’s part of the fun of using Twitter, and part of why it’s so great. But those who exhibit restraint and pick their moment are the most successful — and avoid pulling down their performance with a bunch of doughnut holes (or Os, in my case).
Above all: try things.
Twitter is massive. As such, each individual account is an exercise in Goliath-slaying. Estimates on these kind of things vary wildly, but it seems the consensus is that over 70% of the over 340 million tweets sent every single day attract no reaction at all. On the flip side, less than one tenth of Twitter users attract a majority of the attention.
The fact is that — aside from obvious things like tweeting at times of day when more people are online, or taking advantage of massive social events — there’s still no real consensus as to what makes a “good tweet.” (Go ahead, take this New York Times quiz and see if you can tell. If you can, congratulations! You beat the machine.)
Anytime you tweet, try something different that isn’t just hashtags: add a photo to boost clicks, or phrase things differently, or reach out to other people who are experts in what you’re trying to share. Whenever I publish something, I always try different things. Sometimes things work, sometimes they don’t. But when you’re such a small fish, it’s always worth trying to make a big splash.
And now, you can better measure just how many ripples you’re making.
Smart social strategies are just some of the many things we think about for clients at Atlantic Media Strategies. Sign up for our weekly newsletter, the Digital Trends Index, and get in touch with us on Twitter.
