Simon Turner

Are you successful on twitter?

This is Tommy the tit, he’s just got his 1000th follower and is chuffed to bits.

Everytime he tweets, his 1000 followers see his message and he gets to feel really important.

………But what happens to Tommy’s tweet once it’s out there in the twitterverse?

Does anybody bother to read it? Does it have any influence on anyone? And are, in fact, his 1000 followers comprised largely of spambots and auto followers?

So how can Tommy judge if he’s genuinely successful on Twitter if follower numbers alone are meaningless?

Influence, Influence, Influence!

Without influence your tweets are pointless. This applies to every tweeter out there. If you’re a business, do you influence people to buy your product or remember your brand? If you’re a thought leader, do people read what you recommend they should be reading? If you tweet to your friends, do they all come running to the pub when you tweet ‘Fancy a pint’?

So how should we be measuring twitter success if it’s not a numbers game, and surely influence is pretty damn impossible to measure anyway……. well no, not at all nowadays actually!

For me there are three key stats which will show if you are successful on twitter:

1) Click throughs on links you post.

Be it a link to your own blog, or a resource you’re recommending, you want people to follow that link. The more people who click through respect your recommendations and want to listen to what you have to say. Most link shortening services provide really simple tracking so it’s easy as pie to get a good idea of how well your tweets are received, almost immediately after sending.

2) Retweets

How many people like what you have to say enough to shout about it to their followers? A retweet is the highest recommendation in twitterland, so look out for them, and treasure them. Build relationships with those who retweet you and carry on discussions with them about what they have retweeted.

This again is so straightforward to measure with a simple feature such as Tweetmeme

3) Monitor tweets @You

When you post a question, how many people carry on the conversation with you? This is a great measure of your genuine popularity and influence. You might have 1000 followers but if none of them reply to you what are the chances they’re paying any attention to you at all?

So in summary, Twitter follower numbers as a metric are dead. Discuss!