So this is a bit of a long time coming but part 2 of my twitter ‘experiments’ can be found below:
Experiment 2:
My second experiment involved messaging and how much interaction cans a personality or twitter brand can have with its followers. Yet again I decided to take a twitter alias(@socialmediabot2) as I’m far from the average twitter user. Going to wefollow I decided to follow 50 people (close to the average of 69 ) and posted intermittently hoping perhaps for some interaction with who I’m following … a bit of a downfall of this experiment lack of true connection with people.
Afterwards, starting on the Monday morning I started posting messages from another account. 1 for every half hour for 7.5 hours for a total of 14 with the messages ( TEST #_ ) to see how this would be viewed on my feed. I wanted to see how the everyday messaging from the people I followed would fit with the planned ‘corporate’ messaging and whether it would overload my feed and possibly cause me to want to unfollow the account
The Result:
Twitter Overload
As you can see there are portions of my feed where the messaging overlapped, for a casual user of twitter this may just be too much! Especially for accounts with little customer interaction ( just sharing links, company news etc) a strong consideration will have to be made regarding how many times to post daily will work to allow you to build and retain your audience.
Overall Takeaways:
Twitter is still a difficult area to get solid data from and you can’t just jump on twitter hoping for success in your campaigns or awareness.It takes planning and organization but even then trial and error is needed. I think something that is often missed with twitter for heavy users like myself is we forget that the vast majority of people don’t follow hundreds of people or have the equivalent # of followers .
They follow friends and organizations that they are close to and that needs to be considered when planning out a campaign. While heavy twitter users may be able to withstand messaging it probably would be seen as spam to these casual users. I think an excellent example of how to avoid this sort of twitter spam is from Best buy and their Twelpforce where they have once central account but many separate support accounts.
Have any questions/comments ? Contact me at kevin@kevrichard.com or send me a twitter message .
Tags: corporate communications, Marketing, Social Media, Twitter