Pear Analytics recently did a study on how people are using and consuming Twitter. The study took 2,000 random tweets from the public timeline in English and in the U.S. over a period of 2 weeks, from 11:00a to 5:00p (CST) and was posted by Ryan Kelly. While I applaud the effort and think they are on the right track on providing a super-value added study to the public and marketers, I wouldn’t call this a conclusive study. Ryan mentioned that they will update it regularly so that’s a good thing.

Here are the results of the study with the categories defined by Pear Analytics:

• Pointless babble 40.55%
• Conversational 37.55%
• Pass along value 8.70%
• Self promotion 5.85%
• Spam 3.75%
• News 3.60%

You can read about the details of the study yourself (link at end of this post.) Some of the most surprising results are the following:

• Self promotion and spam are not as prominent as many have complained about.
• News represents a very small amount of activities, despite recent media buzz.

So it looks like issues that affect many people (like the Iran election and spams) that receive huge news coverage also tend to pump up public impressions about Twitter and exaggerate their real impacts. The real numbers seem to show that these are not much of a problem; you just think they’re big problems because they’re constantly in your face or they annoy you a lot. With more refinement (such as extended time of day included in the study) we may see an increase in these numbers.

I look at this study as work in progress with better updates to be expected. Here are a few issues I see that should be resolved to improve the study value in the future:

• Pointless babble is not necessarily a negative thing as its name may suggest. This category needs more refinements as this big group represents many important pieces of information, both to consumers and marketers. For the consumers and individuals, it is exactly the social aspect of social networking, and people will continue to socialize the way they want to. All you can do accept it and understand it, not control or eliminate it. And this social spaces and activities are exactly where marketers need to be to understand consumer behaviors.
• The time periods of 11:00 am to 5:00 pm CST is too limited to really understand Twitter users in the U.S. It’s only 6 hours of each of the time zones. At a minimum I think the study should begin at 6:00 am to midnight for each time zone. As it is, it merely tracks only the lunch to early evening hours of east coast time (noon to 6:00 pm, entirely missing 12 hours of east coast tweets,) and includes only the mid morning to mid-afternoon hours of west coast time (9:00 am to 3:00 pm, again entirely missing 12 hours of west coast tweets in the morning, late afternoon and evenings.)

See the original Pear Analytics post on “Twitter Study Reveals Interesting Results About Usage.”

Post from: Marketing Autopsy Blog
© 2009 Marketing Autopsy Blog.

Pointless Babble Is King: Twitter Study Almost Hits the Mark

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Updated 08-18-09. We’ve read all the buzz about using Twitter, from sources in print and online, from friends to co-workers. Do a quick search on your favorite search engine and you’ll find the latest tips on how to deploy and employ Twitter for personal and business purposes. It’s not hard to find tweeting theories, tips, tools and zillions of other advices on how to tweet successfully. What’s really lacking is a practical, realistic step-by-step guide to tweet, but I believe I’ve found one that’s easy yet detailed enough that will work with almost all things you apply to. I’m still testing it but so far it’s working great for me, and based on the process I believe it will continue to help me for a long time to come.

Like many marketers, I’ve looked for solutions for tweeting but never really found anything that sounded and looked good enough to even start. And I know many others have actually tried a few with varying degree of success, but those were never long-term successes for many reasons. This process I’ll describe here works because it’s simple, realistic and doable. There are some pretty basic ideas mentioned here, plus a few more advanced concepts. Together as a package they provide one powerful tool. So here’s the process.

1. Social network etiquette still rules. Whatever you do, do not forget the basic rules and etiquette of social network and social marketing. After all Twitter is a blogging tool and a social networking tool that you should respect while using it. Take advantage of it like you would LinkedIn, Facebook, and MySpace, but do not abuse.
2. It’s still all about helping others find what they need. Unlike traditional marketing (some call it “outbound marketing”,) social network has never been and will never be about you and/or your company. It’s all about contributing what you can to the social network and help other people solve their problems.
3. You must know your target social groups and customers. Assuming you have something to offer (expertise, skills or knowledge,) you need to focus on your niche and not take the shotgun approach. By focussing on your target groups you’ll be more relevant. There are plenty of tools out there to help you find people with particular interests, but one of the best ways to target a group is to tweet from both your heart and your head, consistently (see 5. below.) Over time your group will find you. It’s inbound marketing at work.
4. It’s important to apply your branding to your Twitter account. This includes your username, bio, background, etc. Use your business sense to do this, but whether this is for personal or business purpose, your brand is what you present to the world about you.
5. Start blogging, not just about what you had for lunch, but what you’re all about, what your interests are, and what you find important and useful you can pass on to others. You should know what your brand is about, and many tools are available to help you post/blog relevant topics all day long (as your time permits.) One such tool is the Google Alerts service. Also there are tools to automate posting of your content as well.
6. Find your targets to follow. Just like in any other industry, it’s all about finding and associate with people with the same interests, problems, pursuits or passions as your own. In the business world, another layer would be finding people with the same interests, problems, pursuits or passions as your business, either to give help to or get help from. In time if you have something to offer they will follow you back. And this is how you build your network. Again automation tools abounds to help you find targeted people and build your follower network.
7. Set up automation to greet new followers when they first follow you. It’s part of the social landscape, and greetings, together with your brand, are the first impressions in the social networking sphere. Be professional and never pushy. People who greet others with a sales pitch give a poor first impression.
8. Know what you want. I saved this for last but it may as well be your very first step. You must know what you want to achieve with Twitter in particular, and with social network in general. Whether it’s brand awareness, click through rates, traffic counts or whatever else is important to you, only you know this. So clearly define your goals and stay on track.

I have applied the above process successfully in conjunction with a tool called the “Twitter Traffic Machine.” It is an effective tool and process combination, and I’m applying it with great results for my clients. The Twitter Traffic Machine, and a few other similar offerings currently floating around the Internet, are getting a bad rap for what they’re trying to do as the end goal and are considered spam tools by many. My view is, of course any tool in the “wrong” hand or used irresponsibly can result in undesirable consequences. For me as a marketer, it’s a tool that I’ll take advantage of in my own ethical way.

The bottom line is, if you put this tool/process combination in your marketing toolbox and use it everyday with your other tools like SEO, SEM, direct/email marketing and ad promotion and tracking apps, then you’ll benefit from it. And like other great tools of the trade, you’ll have to really use it to benefit from it.

By the way for interesting reads on the Twitter bird and the brand, read Nils Geylen’s “The Twitter Logo, Or Is It?” and Cormac Kelly’s “The Birdie brand and the Twitter bird.” As it turns out Cormac Kelly is not making his post available online any longer, but he is very generous to allow his full post content republished here. Thanks Cormac! Find out what Cormac is up to these days, head over to Birdie Web Design.

The Birdie brand and the Twitter bird

Since I launched the Birdie site a couple of weeks back, there has been loads of great feedback, which is always appreciated, but it’s been mentioned a couple of times that the Birdie icon is similar to the Twitter bird. In this post i’ll address the comparisons and give a bit more background on the brand.

About Twitter

Twitter, for those living under a rock, is a mobile micro-blogging application. Users send and receive updates via text messages, and there are a load of third-party apps to feed updates to blogs and the like. I havn’t played with it much myself (it’s a bit too pervasive for my taste, but thats just me) but it’s a bit of a phenomenon and is widely used. Twitter have a very strong brand presence as a result.

In hindsight the comparison was always going to happen. Twitter has a lot of momentum right now, especially within the blogging and web communities, so pretty much anything with a little bird reference is going to bring Twitter to mind at the moment. Obviously this wasn’t my intention!

The origins of Birdie

A bit of context on the Birdie brand will help here. I came up with the name while I was looking at domain hacks, inspired by the social bookmarking site del.icio.us and the (really nice) Irish photo sharing site pix.ie. I started going through words that end in .ie and came across Birdie. It was perfect – memorable, personable and, in combination with the domain name, it gave me a real ’smile in the mind’ as they say.

It all tumbled along from there really. I ran it past a few people and they liked it (and my girlfriend loved it), so I registered the name, and then the URL. (Which I couldn’t believe was still available.)

Visual Designs

I designed the logotype and decided on the colours based on nothing more than my current personal taste. The final element was an icon to fit the name.

It’s here the Twitter comparisons really come in I guess. I don’t think it’s all that similar, or at least it’s no more similar than any other vector bird. Nils Geylen has kindly provided a comparison which puts this better than I can. (Thanks Nils.) Thing is, the two birdies have very similar histories: They are from the same place.

The Twitter bird imagery, on the home page at least, is from iStockPhoto, and is mostly by Simon Oxley of idokungfoo. The Birdie, um, birdie, is taken from iStockPhoto illustrations by Freelance Bloke. Take a look at Twitter’s here and Birdie’s here.

So there you have it. It’s all very flattering to be compared to such a good brand, and though I resent the rip accusation a bit I know it’s not true. There is also quite a long story about how I got my particular icon, but it’s too long and dull to get into here. Anyway, you know what they say – there is no such thing as bad publicity!

Have a tweet tip? Share it with us.

Post from: Marketing Autopsy Blog
© 2009 Marketing Autopsy Blog.

How to Increase Twitter Followers: Putting Twitter in Your Marketing ToolBox

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