Response Rates to Twitter Depend on Type of Profile

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Created on Tuesday, 28 June 2011 23:18

Written by Christine Mason Mccaull

Question:  Are there measurable differences in the response rates to Tweet activity by type of site?

Answer:  Absolutely, yes!

The most attentive followers are true community members.

We mean true on and offline communities here- such as churches, clubs, membership based organizations. These site or profile followers are the most engaged as a group, and are 4x as likely to respond to a Tweet as a business or consumer site follower with a site click, or 4.4% * reach, with reach defined as (# of Followers * # of Tweets).

Business followers are paying more focused attention.  Business site followers are 2x as likely to respond to a Tweet as a consumer site follower, or 2.2% times reach.

Consumer sites have the most diffused following. Using the median in our survey, the base formula for consumer followers to site traffic is 1.1% times reach.

What about Authority?  Was there a variation in response rates when you adjusted for the "Followers to Following", or Authority, ratio?

We hypothesized that there would be a higher clickthrough rate when we adjusted for "authority"- seeing whether people who had significantly more people following them than they were following- and were surprised to see that wasn't the case.  In other words, from this first cut at the data, one doesn't seem to get punished by following a lot of people.   In some cases, reciprocal following even seemed to create goodwill and increase RTs and reposts.

Takeaways:

Adjust your expectations on results based on how central you are to a users' life. Community and Work trump Brands and Products in almost every case (*with the exception of promotional discounts and contests- that data is coming up in another post).

Don't hesitate to follow back if that's what's genuine for you or your brand.

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