The disappointing truth about how many people see your Tweets (A: Not many)

Twitter first announced its newly revamped analytics platform back on July 11th and heralded the arrival of impression data from the horses mouth. For the first time, we were getting Twitter’s own impression data about how many people actually have the real opportunity see your Tweets.

Danny Sullivan at Marketingland was quick off the mark to look at the data. As he soon realised, the number of people that actually do have the opportunity to see your Tweet is a very small percentage of your overall follower base. In his examples, it was about 1.3pc to 4.1pc at best.

I’ve been carrying out a similar analysis on various Twitter accounts that I have access to - and my findings are in line with Danny - just under the 5pc mark on average.

In many ways, this is simply bearing out what Followerwonk’s follower reports have been saying all along - that for any given point in the day, the chances that more than 6pc of your followers are active on Twitter is pretty slim (see below for an example of Followerwonk’s Twitter activity graph).

Retweets do clearly increase the possibility that more people will see your Tweets - but not by much in absolute terms. The best impression number I’ve had so far for an individual Tweet was 1100 - a near 5 fold increase on my average. This was due to it receiving five retweets.

But that just increased its general reach as opposed to reach within my own followers. As a rule, increased impression numbers do result in an increase in general engagement - but not by huge amounts. And even then, does that engagement then translate into a meaningful outcome such as sales or behaviour change?

So what do you do?

As Danny Sullivan pointed out, one logical conclusion is to simply post more Tweets. Assuming no audience overlap between individual Tweet impressions (admittedly a major assumption), then given a typical 3 - 5pc impression ratio, any account will need to Tweet 20 - 30 times (or more) to reach its entire follower base (this also assumes the follower base is real and contains no fakes).

This in turn has implications - if you want every one of your followers to see the same Tweet, you’ll need to repost it, 20 - 34 times (which will require some reworking of the Tweet wording, otherwise it will be seen as automated spam by Twitter). Or if you are simply going for reach, then you’ll need to find ways to create/curate 20 - 34 pieces of content per day or week - depending on the frequency with which you wish to reach your audience. Curiously, I’ve noticed recently a big increase in the number of social media tools vendors offering new services to help you identify, schedule and distribute other people’s content - here’s just a small selection:

Buffer (via the Daily app)

Klout (now equally a content recommendation engine as well as a social scoring platform)

Swayy

Trendspottr

Hootsuite (with Suggested)

And I'm sure there are more.

Having tried all of above platforms, what I can say is that every tool seems to suggest a different set of content that is “right” for you - not surprising given they all use different methods to determine what content to suggest to you = but also not helpful to a social media manager who doesn’t want to rely upon 6 or more content suggestion tools (on top of all the other tools potentially at their disposal for all the other aspects of the job). At the moment, the best way is probably to try them all out and see which ones seem to suggest content that does work best relative to your own objectives.

But to return to the issue of how many people actually see your Tweets, what we are really talking about is “viewability”. If you then actually want people to do something like click on a link, reply, etc, then the numbers are even smaller. And as I’ve pointed out, in previous posts, you may be setting yourself up for misaligned expectations if you base your targets on large (and largely) erroneous vanity metrics such as followers and likes.

So does this mean social is a waste of time?

Not at all. It means social media isn’t a simple, quick fix panacea. And it certainly isn’t a bargain basement alternative to other channels. It places a premium on proper goal setting, research and genuine metric benchmarks in order to determine what can or can’t be realistically achieved (like any other marketing channel).

Ultimately, if social media is going to get increased investment, we all have to get better at proving its real value. That will require changes in mindset, methodology and measurement. No easy task. But one that anyone who is serious about demonstrating the value of social media will need to buy into. And fast.