How To Maximize Your Reach on Twitter

Tweets are ephemeral. Chances are, unless a person is engaged with Twitter when you tweet, they aren’t going to have the opportunity to read it. Not only do people ignore or lose track of old tweets, they are dropped from the Twitter database. Unlike a blog, which is long-lived and indexed by Google for future reference, tweets are heavily time-dependent. If you’re running a business trying to reach as many customers as possible with your corporate message, the timing and frequency of your tweets are critical to your success.

In a previous post, I examined the question of what time of day is best to tweet. To determine the answer, I analyzed two sets of data representing the behavior of two different groups of followers. It turned out that each group had a different best time of day to tweet, and that a single tweet reached between 10% and 24% of the followers.

That brings up the question: if you employ multiple tweets, what percentage of your followers can be reached? Guy Kawasaki recommends posting your most important tweets 4 times, 8 to 12 hours apart, to reach as many of your followers as possible. Let’s take a look at this question for the same two groups of followers analyzed in my previous post.

A quick review: I collected data over the course of several weeks for two Twitter groups –  followers of a company supplying services to event professionals, and followers of a company selling CRM software. The data set consisted of several thousand tweets, including the username, the time and day of the tweet, and the tweet itself. For the purpose of this analysis, I assumed that the best indicator of a given follower’s availability to read tweets was whether or not they had tweeted within a given hour. I was then able to determine for any given hour of the day, how many unique followers were active, and presumably reading their Twitter stream.

To figure out the impact of multiple tweets on reach, I then ranked all of the hours in the day in order of how many unique twitterers there were during any given hour. Choosing each hour in order of priority, I then eliminated duplicates.

The results for the group of event professionals are as follows:

The graph displays the percentage of unique followers that can be reached for each tweet. For example, a single tweet during the best hour of the day can reach 24% of the followers, two separate tweets during the two most active hours of the day, 40%, and three 50%. The graph shows that using Guy Kawasaki’s rule of thumb, that you can reach 60% of your followers with four tweets (we’ll see later that these four tweets should not take place 8 – 12 hours apart). For this group of event professionals, it takes eight tweets to reach 80% of the followers.

Now let’s examine how reach is affected by multiple tweets for the CRM software group:

As you can see, there are dramatic differences between the two groups in the extent to which a given percentage of followers can be reached with the same number of tweets. For example, it takes ten tweets to reach 60% of the CRM software group, compared to the four tweets needed to reach 60% of the event professionals group.

Each group is different. If your business needs to make sure its message is reaching the widest possible audience, you need to develop a similar analysis for your group of followers.

The graphs above show only the number of tweets required to reach a given percentage of followers, but not what times to tweet.  The chart below reveals when each tweet should be deployed to achieve the reach shown in the graphs above.

Note that the first three tweets for each group, while not in identical order, occur in the 10:00 AM – 12:59 PM time period. After the first three tweets, the best time for additional tweets varies according to the group. In both cases, Guy Kawasaki’s rule of thumb – four tweets 8 – 12 hours apart – would not maximize reach. To be fair to Guy, his rule of thumb may well work for his group of followers. The point I’m making here is that you can’t generalize – there is a different strategy to maximize reach for each group of followers.

Summary

• If you are trying to maximize the effective reach of your message, the ephemeral nature of a tweet puts a premium on the timing and frequency of your tweets.
• A single tweet will only reach a fraction of your followers. For the two groups examined, the range was 10% to 24%.
• By analyzing the times during which your followers tweet, it is possible to develop a strategy to predict the percentage of your followers that you can reach with multiple tweets.
• It is also possible to determine the best times of day for multiple tweets. Note that the muliple tweets don’t necessarily have to take place during one day; they can be spread out over several days so as not to annoy your most attentive followers.
• Every group of followers is different. You need to analyze the tendencies of your followers to determine the optimal strategy for maximizing the reach of your most critical messages.