Sometimes it can feel as if endless effort goes into Twitter without very much coming back out. There is so much happening on there, all formatted in much the same way, that it can be difficult to make any one tweet stand out. Now a new study has revealed a few simple tricks that can help ordinary businesses to make their tweets much more visible.
There is nothing revolutionary here – in fact, some marketers have been using these tricks for years –but what is important is that this study has provided solid evidence to clarify what is going on, making it possible to take things a stage further. It also brings Twitter marketing techniques up to date, noting for instance that tweets with pictures attached are more than twice as likely to be retweeted. As Twitter has recently simplified the addition of pictures, this is something that will be easy for businesses to try straight away and is just a question of choosing images that have the right kind of customer appeal.
The study was based on a sample of 1,500 Twitter accounts, each with over 1,000 followers. It found that Twitter is busiest on weekdays, with midweek busiest of all, but that tweets are more likely to be retweeted at the weekends. The busiest time is the middle of the day – probably when people at work are taking their lunch breaks – and it remains more active through the afternoon than in the morning. Retweets are most common late in the evening, which suggests that people may read tweets more carefully at times when they are receiving fewer of them.
Unsurprisingly, tweets with hashtags were shown to be retweeted more often. Five was the optimum number of tags per tweet, although a sudden spike in retweets became apparent when 13 or more tags were added; this suggests two distinct underlying trends.
Another piece of Twitter news to emerge this week was the arrival of broad match keyword targeting for its internal search facility, meaning that it can now cope with misspellings and what it describes as ‘Twitter lingo’. It will also consider synonyms in order to give more useful results all round. The result, from a marketing perspective, is a far wider set of opportunities to get noticed within a given field. Closely related tweets made within a short time period can easily accumulate to provide a snapshot of what the business is about when somebody searches for a related term.
