Today I've read an article (from Wired) about the social network Twitter, claiming that around 71% of tweets from users are 'ignored' and receive no response at all.
Canadian social media analytics company Sysomos scanned 1.2 billion tweets from August and September 2010 in an attempt to gain an understanding of the "conversations" that occur on the site.
Some stats from the report:
- Around 7/10 tweets receive no response (the report didn't mention whether they were read or not, as it would be presumably impossible to check)
- Of the remaining 3/10 tweets, only six percent are retweeted. 92 percent of those retweets occur within the first hour.
- 23 percent of tweets receive an @reply. 85 percent of replied to messages get just one reply, 10.7 percent receive two, and just 1.53 percent get three replies.
- 96.9 percent of all @replies are posted within an hour of the original "tweet"
So, after reading all of this, it's very easy to turn round and question what purpose Twitter serves, especially as a PR / MarComms tool. But I think that's missing the point - although it is possible to communicate with other users, the primary focus (especially in PR terms) is often to disseminate information to followers.
I'm also very surprised to find that most "tweets" could almost be described as having a "sell-by date" on them, especially one so short. In order to gain as much 'exposure' for what I post, i have my Twitter page syndicated to my personal Facebook page, so that I only have to post from one place to cover all the networks I use. (For those interested, this is possible through the Twitter 'app' on Facebook)
Still - at least now I don't feel so bad about not getting many replies to my #xfactor tweets on a Saturday night!
Are you on Twitter? Feel free to advertise your @username (I'm always looking for new people to follow / have follow me - mine is @paultays)
Do you think that Twitter is an essential communication tool, or just a celebrity folly?
Let me know - post a comment below!
Paul
I see the point of Twitter - it's a useful RSS style tool, great for companies, bloggers and other individuals that want to express and discussion an opinion.
ReplyDeleteOn the other the hand, it's not suprising so few are replied to.
For example, I don't reply to ones like your latest one because I'm doing it on your blog instead, and as a huge amount of twitter posts are links to conversations outside of Twitter, i imagine thats where a lot of it comes from. Sometimes the Twitter character limit works against it.
I think the biggest reason though is that nobody cares. How many of those tweets are actually honestly looking to ignite discussion, and how many are the case of narcissists just wanting people to listen to them?
A lot of the conversation all happens at once, as well. I've never watched the X factor or Big Brother, but I know from my Facebook every night these shows are on theres like 20 people saying something about who is rubbish and who is amazing or whatever, most of them probably get drowned out becuase they all happen in that very short period of time the show is on?