I found an article a few days ago about how twitter content is used by companies and brands and how it should be used. Every company can send random content on twitter about their products or news about their company. This article written by Morgan J. Arnold tells some facts about what to post on twitter and what works, and what doesn’t.
The first thing the study of this article discusses is whether a Photo tweet or a text tweet produces the most retweets and the most reach. The outcome of this question is that photo’s outperform text tweets by 91%. So it might be more useful for companies and brands to use more images, but only 2.3% of the tweets that were in this study were Photo tweets. So companies and brands don’t use these type of tweets that often even though they have more engagement with the followers. The article also gives a reason for this. Most companies and brands use twitter as a customer service platform where they don’t use photos. They use twitter as a text platform to answer short questions from followers and customers of their products. But the photos on twitter can be a significant opportunity to increase their engagement with the twitter users though photos (http://socialmediatoday.com/morgan-…, 2012).
The study where this article is based on also goes further into detail about what kind of content works in tweets. It begins with the fact that every brand and every company has a different target audience so the perfect type of content depends on the process for each brand or company. But the study tracked the tweet content of the 100 most engaged brands on Twitter. In this way this study tried to find a pattern what might be used more broadly. What the study found was kind of similar to what they found for Facebook. The content what works the best is the content where brands and companies ask for a retweet, or on Facebook for a like. There are fewer options to ask for a retweet than to ask for a like on Facebook. The study found that tweets with the text ‘Retweet’ in the tweet works the best to get a retweet an more engagement with twitter users. If a brand uses a ‘#’ in their tweet it gave them a 35% lift in the engagement on twitter. But the study did not made it clear whether this was the result of increased searchability or that the increase was caused by pernouncing the subject of the tweet with a hash tag. Tweets with a special offer for a product or a coupon performed worse than average. I found this very interesting, because this statement says that people are not following the companies or brands to get a discount or coupon, but to stay informed about the company and to say in touch with the brands (http://socialmediatoday.com/morgan-…, 2012).
I found these results very interesting and thought that you might want to read this article.
You can find the whole text of this article here.
I hope you found this article just as interesting as me.
Share your thoughts,
Tim
Reference
http://socialmediatoday.com/morgan-j-arnold/890546/optimizing-twitter-engagement-tweet-content-works, 2012
