So, just like you’ve done on facebook, and all the other social media sites, you’ve worked hard to build up people who follow/like/pin you – you’ve worked hard to build up people who you can talk to, or so you assume.
Your Twitter followers have always been important and you’ve worked at it, and you now have 12,000, with more following you every day.
This must be great – after all Twitter is mentioned every day on radio and TV, millions upon millions of people use it across the world – so the more followers you have the better?
Right?
Maybe…. we need to thing about value, revenue and engagement.
How much is a Twitter Follower Worth?
One thing that’s worth asking yourself is how much is a Twitter follower actually worth – what is the value of a Twitter follower to your business?
In a recent court case between mobile phone site PhoneDog and an employee they alleged that he took 17,000 followers with him when he left the business, so they sued. In his case the company valued each follower at $2.50.
While the final value was not disclosed, I think it’s safe to assume that the company would have pushed the value upwards in the initial submissions, but even so, even if it is a real genuine value they put it at a maximum of £1.53 per follower.
To that company, each follower was worth £1.53.
Are they worth £1.53? Wouldn’t that assume that you can generate an average of £1.53 revenue from each follower?
In my experience it is probably less than that.
How long does a Tweet last?
Bearing mind that you probably follow 100 people (the average user has 126 followers, so it might be an underestimate but let’s keep the numbers as round as possible) – that would mean that you probably get about 10 – 20 updates an hour. If you assume most people won’t scroll down past position 10 (which is below the initial screen on most displays) then each tweet lasts for about 30 minutes before being lost in the deluge – Much much shorter if your customers use twitter on their mobiles, which so many of them do.
In August 2013 Twitter recorded 5,700 tweets per second – which is amazing in itself. But let’s hope that your marketing Tweets are not being drowned out.
What do people do with the tweets?
One thing as a business owner you should be obsessing over is Twitter’s engagement rates. How many of your followers respond to any given tweet, well it seems to depend on how many followers you have;
- If you have less than 22,000 followers – expect a 0.44% engagement
- If you have 22-40,000 followers – expect a 0.38% engagement
- If you have 350,000 followers then expect a 0.11% engagement rate
So if you have 1,000 followers – then you can expect 4.4 of them to respond to your tweet – that does not mean that they go to your site, or buy anything, it just means that they could retweet or share in some way.
4.4 of them will do something which could be of some value to you as a business but 995.6 of them will ignore you completely.
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So add up the number of followers – and estimate how much revenue you have pulled from them in the last year… ask yourself is it really worth the effort you go to?
And, if not, what should you do?
How can you make Twitter work for you?