My relationship with Twitter has been one of love/hate. Truth be told, it has been far more hate than love.
But I have gone through phases where I have liked the platform, and I do recognise its utility for research, having written about this before.
To reiterate, I have always used Twitter to keep on top of developments in the legal world: new decisions from the courts or the WRC/Labour Court and changes in the law. I maintain a list of persons and sources in the world of law and check this list every Saturday morning to see if there is anything new. If there is it may be worth a blog post for one of my sites.
Apart from this use of Twitter as a listening post I have really only sent out automated, scheduled tweets simply to maintain a presence.
At the weekend, however, I decided to spend a few minutes looking at the analytics Twitter provides. You can download analytics for the last 28 days or any month of the last six.
The metrics I was interested in were:
- Impressions and
- Profile clicks
These are the vital metrics from my perspective-that is, with my small business marketing head engaged. And it is plain as a pikestaff that if you want to increase the amount of impressions, and as a consequence profile clicks, then you need to respond and reply to big accounts.
It is that simple. The data does not lie.
I have known this before, having discovered it and having read about it from some guys who have built massive followings on Twitter. But I was simply not willing to put in the work.
I might now. I don’t need to, and if I decide to it will be very much on my own terms. But at least I have satisfied myself, having looked at the data, that this is the key to growing a following on Twitter.
P.S. You can check me out on Twitter here.