Sunday 26 July 2009

A tweet too soon

On Thursday (23 July) I tweeted that Fabrica had just hit 250 followers, I think it's good to mark these kind of landmarks and to say thank you. Sadly that night Twitter did a spambot purge and the next morning we had lost about 20 followers so I'd tweeted just hours or maybe minutes too soon. I don't have any issues with losing the numbers of course, I'd rather have ten meaningful followers than a thousand not, but what surprised me is that roughly ten percent of our followers were spambots. That's a big number considering that I'm pretty careful to block anyone dodgy looking, you know the ones that are following two and a half thousand people but have like three followers themselves. Beyond that it got me to thinking about how we reach out to people as an organisation and how people are using Twitter. I read somewhere that 20% of Twitter users generate 80% of tweets, you know if you use use Twitter yourself that this seems about right. In terms of the Fabrica followers there are a hardcore who respond to tweets in different ways, commenting, retweeting etc but what are the others doing. Are they listening but not responding? Are we just lost in the twitter noise generated by all their friends? Are they people that signed up but haven't engaged since? I'm assuming that anybody who hates what we're tweeting has stopped following us. Of course it's all those things and probably more but it made me think that when we're thinking about how to encourage dialogue or get a message out we need to think about all those different users and their differing needs. Maybe that's obvious and I've been a bit slow off the mark but I suspect that many organisations using Twitter for whatever reasons think about their followers as a single body.

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