Tuesday, October 12, 2010
Twitter Response Rates: 29%
Not a bad rate of online viewer engagement. Imagine if your pay-per-click advertising campaigns had a 29% response rate. You’d be stoked, right? According to an article on Wired.com, a full 71 percent of tweets are ignored. But are all tweets worth a response? Probably not, and that includes the kinda of tweets most business could generate.
I’ve had several clients ask me if they should setup a Twitter account for their business. If I used the numbers in the Wired article, how could I say no. But the numbers don’t really tell all the story of a slow Twitter feed and its appearance on a site.
Twitter of course, is a social networking tool that suits many businesses,celebrities, work groups, certainly individuals but not all. Twitter is all about buzz. For instance, an auto repair shop might never have the kind of info to share to build a fan-base. But a high fashion designer . . . or a Red Camera, now that’s more obvious. The transmission shop, may never have enough buzz since its just not the right type of info for fast-moving social media.
For websites, two problems can manifest themselves from a slow Twitter feed. The first is and has been obvious for a while—a slow Twitter feed makes the site look dead. The infrequently updated Twitter feed conveys a sense of sluggishness simply because its a medium that thrives on action. Tweets should be frequent to convey the liveliness intended by the 140 character limitation. But the the format just doesn’t fit most businesses without a marketing department and tons of news bits to tweet about. Traditionally press releases or a “news” section may be more appropriate for the typical business.
The second problem is the amount of re-tweets on many feeds which looks like and is essentially spam. Take a look at “Top Trending Topic” on Twitter. Most of this list are Retweets—a method of sharing an important Tweet with others. Problem is it looks like spam and that exactly what I advise clients to steer clear of.
Back to numbers, on any given day, I would happily take a 29% response rate from any of the outreach campaigns on a site. But if we look at the Retweets above, how much of that activity can be counted towards a “conversion”?
BTW, you can Tweet this article—just look to the right. 
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