Social media should always be considered a part of a balanced marketing plan. Marketing is not just about acquiring customers and making sales. Instead, marketing is about creating, maintaining and defining a company to customers. Social networking, like all other marketing, is about presenting your company, product or service as an option to customers and providing them with information.
While it may not happen in a single 140-character line, Twitter can open the door for connecting with potential clients, building relationships, and finding new employees.
Here are some facts about twitter that any business should consider adopting:
Timing is everything:
The best time to tweet highly depends on what time of day your particular set of followers are active on Twitter. Recent evidence regarding Twitter usage patterns illustrates exactly how important it is to time your tweets so that you are reaching as large of an audience as possible.
- 97 percent of @ replies happen within the first hour of the original tweet being published
- 23 percent of tweets generate replies, while 6 percent generate retweets.
- Of all tweets that generated a reply, 85 percent have only one reply. Another 11 percent attracted a reply to the original reply – the conversation was two levels deep.
- Only 1.5 percent of Twitter conversations are three levels deep.
- The highest tweet day is Wednesday
Retweeting:
Retweeting is very important to keep the Twitter conversation going. It allows twitter users to share the best links, tweets and information they find from other users on Twitter.
- 92 percent of all retweets happen within the first hour of the original tweet being published. Thus, if your Tweet is not retweeted in the first hour after it is posted, it probably won’t be.
- Retweet days are Monday & Wednesday
- The highest number of retweets are from 2:15 PM to 3:30 PM EST
- 70% of retweets contain a link
- Retweets with a hashtag are more likely to be retweeted
Here are some of the best web-based tools for tracking retweets:
Retweetradar: @retweetradar is a web tool for tracking the most retweeted and trending content on Twitter. It provides a tag cloud to see the most popular content from today, yesterday, and even what’s popular right now.
Retweetist: @retweetist is a tool that tracks the most popular links being retweeted on Twitter, just like Tweetmeme. Retweetist doesn’t stop there, however – it also lists the most retweeted accounts on Twitter.
Tweetmeme: @tweetmeme is an authority when it comes to retweeted URLs and stories. Tweetmeme tracks the most popular links on Twitter. Once a link receives enough retweets, it appears on the front page of Tweetmeme. Tweetmeme can also be broken down by categories (i.e. sports, entertainment, technology).
If you are managing multiple social media accounts, you may be interested in downloading Tweetdeck, Hootsuite or Cotweet. All of these programs can help you organize your social media accounts and allow you to track and monitor what’s going on in the social world.
Twitter Fun Facts:
- 75 percent of Twitter traffic comes from third-party applications
- The number one twitter city is London
- 60 percentof all tweets come from third-party apps
- There are over 100,000 Twitter applications
- 177 million tweets sent on March 11, 2011
- When Michael Jackson died on June 25, 2009 there were 456 tweets per second (TPS)…a record at that time
- The current TPS record is 6,939 tweets per second set 4 seconds after midnight in Japan on New Year’s Day
- 572,000 is the number of new accounts created in one day (March 12, 2011)
- 182 percent is the increase in number of mobile users over the past year
- In March 2011 there are an estimated 225 million users
- 25 billion tweets sent on Twitter in 2010
- 100 million new accounts added on Twitter in 2010
- The first unassisted off-Earth Twitter message was posted from the International Space Station by NASA astronaut T. J. Creamer on January 22, 2010
