As Companies Prepare to Pay for Twitter - The Best Solutions are Free
Twitter has become big business, it's time to treat it as such
This past Sunday, the much anticipated season finale of Lost drew 13.5 million viewers to ABC. This is no surprise, as the finale has been regarded and hyped as the television event of the season. What might surprise you is that Britney Spears, Ashton Kutcher, Ellen Degeneres, and Lady Gaga collectively drew more people to their Twitter accounts that same day.
The ubiquity and power of twitter hasn't escaped corporate America, as companies from Microsoft to Monster have hired full time staff to tweet. Nor has the audience and its commercial power escaped Twitter, which is now trying to earn revenue through advertising. In short, Twitter is becoming big business and changing how we think and what we buy.
Twitter-user behaviors must now play catch up to the sites economic impact. Companies that use focus groups, ad agencies, and comprehensive metrics to maximize their advertising budgets, and even the individual twitter user trying to spread their messages to the world need to get smart. Indeed, before companies and individuals begin to pay twitter what will no doubt be hundreds of millions of dollars each year to sponsor their tweets, there is "low hanging fruit" in simple ways to change tweets and twitter behavior that should drastically increase the number of people who read and retweet these microblogging entries
Through research on more than 200,000 tweets (see our methodology), our team of Stanford students discovered a number of easy and free ways to make sure your followers read your tweets- and retweet them.
The ubiquity and power of twitter hasn't escaped corporate America, as companies from Microsoft to Monster have hired full time staff to tweet. Nor has the audience and its commercial power escaped Twitter, which is now trying to earn revenue through advertising. In short, Twitter is becoming big business and changing how we think and what we buy.
Twitter-user behaviors must now play catch up to the sites economic impact. Companies that use focus groups, ad agencies, and comprehensive metrics to maximize their advertising budgets, and even the individual twitter user trying to spread their messages to the world need to get smart. Indeed, before companies and individuals begin to pay twitter what will no doubt be hundreds of millions of dollars each year to sponsor their tweets, there is "low hanging fruit" in simple ways to change tweets and twitter behavior that should drastically increase the number of people who read and retweet these microblogging entries
Through research on more than 200,000 tweets (see our methodology), our team of Stanford students discovered a number of easy and free ways to make sure your followers read your tweets- and retweet them.
The Early Tweet Catches The Worm
Much like pitching a product if no one is listening will get you nowhere; we believe that tweeting at times when most users are not active is ineffective as you are basically pitching to an empty room. Especially because tweets get "stale" and see diminished interest very quickly (within a few minutes). This leads to the natural question of: When exactly are most twitter users active? In order to determine when the optimal time to tweet is, we looked at the number of users that were active while users were tweeting, basing our time zone in EST. Since tweeters should simply want to maximize their audience at any given time, we felt that keeping track of different time zones was unnecessary. To determine who was active, we looked at users who had tweeted or retweeted at a given time and used an exponential decay model to predict which of those initial users was still active at subsequent times. Our initial hypothesis was that due to vastly different time zones and the resulting varying activity patterns across the globe, there would be multiple peaks in terms of active users. However, the data shows that there is in fact one optimal time to tweet based on the number of active users, which is roughly 11am, EST. Hence, tweeters seeking to maximize their audience should tweet at around that time.
Start Strong, Finish Strong
After establishing the optimal time to tweet in a given day, our next focus was to determine which days of the week to tweet on in order to maximize retweets. By looking at the percentage of tweets on a given day that were retweeted and plotting this against the days of the week, we were able to discern a trend which indicates that Monday and Friday are the optimal days to tweet on to maximize retweets; and as expected, Saturday and Sunday are the worst-performing days. So in order to maximize retweeting, tweeters should tweet at roughly 10am on Mondays and Fridays and avoid tweeting over the weekends.
It Pays to Punctuate
Also important, is dotting your "I"s and crossing your “T”s. We explored the effects of punctuation on the likelihood of being retweeted by comparing tweets with no punctuation to tweets with similar content but with punctuation. We found that even as the use of instant-messaging-like shorthand in communication becomes increasingly pervasive, it still pays off to punctuate correctly. In particular, we found that using periods after tweets had a significant effect on maximizing the chances of being retweeted with an increase of 20% over the sample set that did not contain periods. The use of exclamation points, on the other hand, has less of an impact than we originally thought with an increase of only 3% over the sample set without them. Nevertheless, in order to increase one’s chances of being retweeted, tweeters should be sure to punctuate correctly.
Less Sometimes Means More
An old adage says that empty vessels make the most noise. Along these lines, we decided to investigate the effect that tweeting frequently has on the likelihood of one’s tweet being clicked. To judge this, we looked at tweets that contained links and used bit.ly to track the number of clicks that such tweets obtained. To account for the effect of widely differing numbers of followers between different accounts, we looked at the number of followers an account had at the point of tweeting and calculated a clicks-to-follower ratio for each tweet. Lastly, for each day the account was active, we looked at the number of tweets that were sent out and computed the number of tweets per hour. Upon plotting the click-to-follower ratio against the number of tweets per hour, we discovered that the click through rate decayed as the number of tweets per hour increased, which leads us to believe that in order to receive more clicks, twitter users should tweet less.
Much like pitching a product if no one is listening will get you nowhere; we believe that tweeting at times when most users are not active is ineffective as you are basically pitching to an empty room. Especially because tweets get "stale" and see diminished interest very quickly (within a few minutes). This leads to the natural question of: When exactly are most twitter users active? In order to determine when the optimal time to tweet is, we looked at the number of users that were active while users were tweeting, basing our time zone in EST. Since tweeters should simply want to maximize their audience at any given time, we felt that keeping track of different time zones was unnecessary. To determine who was active, we looked at users who had tweeted or retweeted at a given time and used an exponential decay model to predict which of those initial users was still active at subsequent times. Our initial hypothesis was that due to vastly different time zones and the resulting varying activity patterns across the globe, there would be multiple peaks in terms of active users. However, the data shows that there is in fact one optimal time to tweet based on the number of active users, which is roughly 11am, EST. Hence, tweeters seeking to maximize their audience should tweet at around that time.
Start Strong, Finish Strong
After establishing the optimal time to tweet in a given day, our next focus was to determine which days of the week to tweet on in order to maximize retweets. By looking at the percentage of tweets on a given day that were retweeted and plotting this against the days of the week, we were able to discern a trend which indicates that Monday and Friday are the optimal days to tweet on to maximize retweets; and as expected, Saturday and Sunday are the worst-performing days. So in order to maximize retweeting, tweeters should tweet at roughly 10am on Mondays and Fridays and avoid tweeting over the weekends.
It Pays to Punctuate
Also important, is dotting your "I"s and crossing your “T”s. We explored the effects of punctuation on the likelihood of being retweeted by comparing tweets with no punctuation to tweets with similar content but with punctuation. We found that even as the use of instant-messaging-like shorthand in communication becomes increasingly pervasive, it still pays off to punctuate correctly. In particular, we found that using periods after tweets had a significant effect on maximizing the chances of being retweeted with an increase of 20% over the sample set that did not contain periods. The use of exclamation points, on the other hand, has less of an impact than we originally thought with an increase of only 3% over the sample set without them. Nevertheless, in order to increase one’s chances of being retweeted, tweeters should be sure to punctuate correctly.
Less Sometimes Means More
An old adage says that empty vessels make the most noise. Along these lines, we decided to investigate the effect that tweeting frequently has on the likelihood of one’s tweet being clicked. To judge this, we looked at tweets that contained links and used bit.ly to track the number of clicks that such tweets obtained. To account for the effect of widely differing numbers of followers between different accounts, we looked at the number of followers an account had at the point of tweeting and calculated a clicks-to-follower ratio for each tweet. Lastly, for each day the account was active, we looked at the number of tweets that were sent out and computed the number of tweets per hour. Upon plotting the click-to-follower ratio against the number of tweets per hour, we discovered that the click through rate decayed as the number of tweets per hour increased, which leads us to believe that in order to receive more clicks, twitter users should tweet less.
Please Retweet
There is a popular saying in spanish that transaltes to "Asking one gets to Rome", meaning that if you need help, you only need to ask for it. We found that when a user specifically asks in his tweet to be please be retweeted he is six times more likely to be retweeted. The reason for this may vary. One reason is that people tweet to share information with their followers, and often times this information is merely informative. To retweet will change the dynamics of the tweet from being an announcement made public, to a subject of further discussion. If a user specifically asks his followers to please retweet, he is asking them to actively engage in the subject by either forwarding the information or by offering their own insights. If a user wants to be retweeted, all he has to do is ask.
Link!
Blaise Pascal once famously remarked, "I have only made this letter longer only because I have not found the time to make it shorter.", but even he probably would have had difficultly communicating things of importance in 140 characters. Twitter users get around restriction by including links to webpages in their tweets, almost a quarter of all tweets contain links. These tweets also appear to be the ones having the most impact on the twittersphere, a tweet containing a link is more than five times more likely to be retweeted than one containing only characters. To be retweeted alot find and make compelling content and tweet the links!
Shorten with Care
URL shortening has been a part of twitter for quite a while so we assumed that shortening URL's would either have a positive or neutral affect on how likely a tweet is to be retweeted. However, after reading a blog post by Zemanta, a company that produces tools to help bloggers enrich their posts arguing against the use of URL shorteners we decided to put it to the test. It turns out our initial guesses were incorrect, a tweet containing a bit.ly link is almost 30% less likely to be retweeted than a tweet containing a regular link. Sometimes shortening a url is the only way to get it into a tweet, but when it comes down to a choice between cutting the message or shortening the url, you're probably better off with a shorter message and a long url.
Use Hashtags (with care)
Using hashtags about popular topics can dramatically increase the chance of a retweet. The moral of the story is be part of the twitter conversation. If the topic is the presidential election, find a way to make your product or company relevant. Think of it a bit like sitting at the dinner table. If you want people to listen and reply to what you are saying, don't just blurt whats on your mind, say things relevant to the conversation. Hashtags, in addition to our research, are increasingly important as search engines mine twitter for real time information. Irrelevant hashtags, like irrelevant tweets, tend to hurt the chances of being retweeted.
Tweet to Someone
Tweet directly at other people. This gives you credibility and drastically increases the chance of being retweeted by that person in the future, even if the subsequent post isn't tweeted at them. "Conversational" users, those who tweet directly at someone, in our data have more followers and are much more likely to get retweeted than our random sample of users. Twitter creates the illusion of an audience of millions, but in reality, these relationships need to be developed, randomly broadcasting thoughts is not efficient.
Our Results and Identified
A number of us in the group are interested in how companies recruit new employees. Nedu Ottith in particular works for a company called Identified, a startup that is trying to use the social graph to revolutionize the college recruitment process. One part of their product allows users to follow companies that they might be interested in working for. As the companies post updates about whats going on for their recruitment, users can share these updates through various channels. With the results we have from seeing what gets retweeted on twitter, there are a couple of obvious things that Identified suggest to help companies create updates that users will want to share with their friends and followers, from when to create the post to including links to telling the followers to share the posts with their followers. These might have seemed like good ideas before but now there is hard data to support them.
Big Picture
When the internet first began people actually wrote raw html in order to create webpages. As time went on and less technically inclined users wanted to be able to create engaging content on the world wide web tools to help them do this began to appear, with Dreamweaver, Wordpress and Google Analytics being important and widely used approaches to solving the problem of helping non-technical users create and improve content. Now instead of wanting to create content on the world wide web users want to create content on twitter, facebook and other networking platforms. Thanks to APIs the possibility of building tools to help users create and disseminate content relevant to their users is finally possible. Studying patterns of retweeting in twitter allowed our group to create general rules for what makes a tweet retweetable, but the creation of applications that give fine grained detail into what our friends and friends of friends are interested is now possible. These application will revolutionize the way people interact with the social graph as much as web development and analytics tools have revolutionized the way we interact with the world wide web.
