To Tweet A Little Or A Lot, Aye There's The Rub

Over Memorial Day Weekend I set out to test a proposition. My "test tree" had two branches:

• What impact would "aggressive" tweeting have on list growth or decay (Twitter followers) and traffic to the other two properties I was using as part of the test (ScentTrail Marketing blog and my Scoop.it "Revolutionary" feeds).
• How would constantly tweaking and trimming to near real time impact my social goals impact my goals?

Social Media Marketing Test Goals
I had three social goals:

1. Increase Twitter Followers (get to 1800 followers or more by Monday a 4% increase on the 1,747 starting point).
2. Increase visits to ScentTrail Marketing by at least 10% over daily average of 200 visits.
3. See what impact being highly attentive to what was happening NOW made on other metrics.

Guy Kawasaki Inspiration
I like Guy. He shares easily and well, follows me back and included ScentTrail Marketing in his AllTop group. More than being someone you feel you can have a beer with and not mind paying, Guy is smart, passionate and real (all aspirations when I grow up :).

When someone told me I should be tweeting twice a day I shared a link to Guy's explanation for how he tweets. Here is my favorite piece of Guy's Tweeting Advice:

Twitter is a marketing tool for me. It's not a "social" activity or a game. This process is what it takes to make Alltop successful.
Question: How long do you spend on Twitter every day?
Answer: Asking me this is like asking Tiger Woods how much he plays golf. "It's what I do." If I'm on the computer, I'm on Twitter, and I'm on a computer eight hours per day.

Quote from: http://www.openforum.com/idea-hub/topics/the-world/article/how-i-tweet-guy-kawasaki

Thank you Guy. This is what my tribe of Internet marketers and I do for a living. Perhaps it is strange to Tweet for a living, but I've done stranger things (trust me). This is not to say that tweeting 2x a day is goofystupid. If you are Oprah or a famous basketball player you will have and maintain millions of followers with little effort. If you are a hard working, ditch digging Internet marketer whose only claims to fame is going to school with Jamie Lee Curtis, working with Seth Godin and knowing Red Maxwell then tweeting 2x a day will build a list 10% greater than your closest friends and family.

I love my friends and family, but I get paid to make markets, to sell things (ideas, products, memes) online. Being an Internet marketer is a job I love, am good at and want to continue to do. Imagine I'm interviewing to be the CMO at a medium sized company here in the Triangle. "Martin," the interviewer says patiently but in a way it is clear our interview is over before it started, "help me understand how your Klout score is below 60, you have 200 Twitter followers and what is up with that embarrassing picture on Facebook?" I can't get that job (or any in my chosen profession) unless I understand what is going on behind the curtain, unless I visit and talk to the wizard. There is a Twitter wizard and his name is Guy Kawasaki.

Work Flow
Over the Memorial Day Weekend I wrote three blog posts on ScentTrail Marketing:


Death of Excel RIP
Story Is Your Marketing Strategy
The New SEO - What is Google Up To 

Up against three posts from the previous weekend:
Facebook IPO - Life Lessons For Zuckerberg's Clan
Bronto A Magical Email Marketing Dinosaur
SEO - Google's Float, Keyword Research and Long Tails

Each article was a test of different content silos I'm interested in and see as "hot" including: Business Intelligence (BI), Importance of Storytelling Post Google's Panda and Penguin updates and SEO after Panda and Penguin.

What I Compared Against
I've changed some significant things on ScentTrail about 3 weeks ago, so I was limited to comparing Memorial Day to the previous weekend (Friday through Monday). Figuring the extra days were a wash against the "poor" social nature of Memorial Day Weekend I pressed on.

Tools Used
Here are accounts I used in descending order:

@ScentTrail, Martin Marty Smith on Linkedin, Topsy
Curation Revolution, Business Intelligence Revolution, Startup Revolution and Thank You Revolution on my other Scoop.its
@StoryofCancer, @MobRiff along with a few posts @Atlanticbt (our company Twitter)
My Martin Smith Google Plus Page

My Martin Marty Smith Facebook Page

How Used
I used Scoop.it to test story concepts. This is how stories hitting three distinct areas of Internet marketing: BI, Stories and Panda and Penguin Google were chosen.

I used Twitter in real time to gauge RT's and pick up (something that can only be accurately understood using Topsy or some other ORM (Online Reputation Management) tool such as Google Alerts or Radian6.

I watched my Twitter timeline the most for evidence aggressive tweeting was fatiguing the list, and there was some, but I pressed on since losses were usually gained right back and then some.

I also watched Scoop.it's timeline for related stories and continued to comment on things my Scoop.it tribe knows I care about (cool tools usually from uber-curator Robin Good, cool infographics usually from uber-curator maxOz and cool Internet marketing trends from a host of uber-curators (Gregg, Mike, Internet Billborards, Level343, Gerit, Guiseppe, and etc...).

Finally, and this is a very important tip, I looked for ways to pull in the NOW. When a power Tweeter RTed me I followed suite. I found ways to call attention to the Memorial Weekend and other cool things friends or gurus were tweeting or talking about. I didn't JUST discuss my articles, but I followed the Argyle Social research that showed a 50%/50% mix of promotion to curation is best.


Marty's Memorial Day Twitter And Social Media Test Results
Here is what way too much time on a computer produced over the long weekend in order of what I found most interesting:

• Twitter Followers ended the weekend exactly at 1,800, up 96% over previous weekend gain.

•  Retweets Views up 211% reaching 31,323 vs. 15,901 thanks to power Tweeters such as @SEO_Exp, @1918 and @Gerrit_Bes (not easy to be previous weekend's almost 16K from power Tweeters @businessreporte and @cybereconomics)
•  Retweets were up 266% (from 15 to 40)
• Tweeted 33% more (83x vs. 64 over previous weekend)
• Gained 96% more Twitter followers than the previous weekend (53 vs. 27)
• ScentTrail Marketing had a record weekend on Monday with 342 unique visitors, 15% greater than the previous weekend

• Visits up 17%
• Repeat visitors up 2% (hard to dramatically move this metric, so 2% isn't bad)
• Other important metrics are tied to these seesaw style trended flat, positive or within reason: bounce (down 1%), pages viewed (flat) and time on was off 17% (would be concerning if the other metrics weren't positive)

Martin's Twitter Test Conclusion
The conclusion is simple and regular ScentTrail readers have heard it many times:

More and More, Faster and Faster, Better and Better

You can Tweet as much or as little as you like. As long as your tweets hit home with some tribe somewhere your list will grow. The closer you are to NOW or "near real time" the better, when power Tweeters pick up your stuff say THANKS, watch your metrics like a hawk on a wire looking for dinner and ROCK ON Kawasaki Style!


Resources:
To Tweet A Little Or A Lot on Prezi

Guy K Quote Ref:

Quote from: http://www.openforum.com/idea-hub/topics/the-world/article/how-i-tweet-guy-kawasaki

http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2008/12/how-to-use-twit.html#axzz1wJ68Ntzq
Guy's 2008 post describing how he uses Twitter