The Core

So I've finally begun to explore Twitter, and followed how information content is acted up.

And so far, I'm seeing response rates as pitiful.

I had a Tweet retweeted in front of about 20K people to a forum thread, and saw about 200 actual clickthroughs from this.

I'm finding similar on other information content being linked to from other people.

My impression so far is that Twitter is basically acting like an email list - but that most of the emails are so full of crap most followers have long fatigued from caring from such notices.

I figure, by analogy, if you are on an email list that sends you 10 emails a day, mostly chatter about what they're having for lunch and similar banality, how long would you pay attention to that?

I'm basically wondering if I'm coming out on the overly-cynical side of this, or whether Twitter has some kind of proven CTA statistics based on normal use (as a follower) as opposed to special offers (promoted Tweets).

yeah I'm finding that anything on twitter is more to break up the CS complaints than to actually get any engagement/sales for most clients.

The one thing we do get proportionately more clicks for is creating content around a theme which is more or less on topic but which there are twitter 'official' accounts which get lots of followers - so for example this week is epilepsy week - if you market to an audience epilepsy might impact on (which would be most) and you can link into it somehow, then writing a decent article about it stands an ok chance of getting a retweet from various epilepsy related experts, if their followers are in your target audience you at least stand a chance of getting them to your site.

but unless you can properly attribute it its pretty hard to decide if you actually get any sales from that stuff. if you retarget etc then you probably stand more chance.

I remember reading a couple of years ago that amazon found twitter successful using it for their offers, demand went up dramatically after a tweet but my brands are not known well enough to try and replicate this or gather data. General stats I think will be difficult to find and won't tell you much unless related to your industry as it will be dramatically different for different industries and approaches. You would probably be better spending you time looking for examples of how people have used it effectively ie individual campaigns and seeing if you can adapt these to relate to you and test it that way with a running start.

From my experience on social media campaigns.. Twitter seems to thrive on passions and desire and facebook passions and social/personal interest. I haven't seen an monitored success outside of campaigns that are targeting these elements and would expect a low click through rate for standard content distribution and offers.

I am going to follow this up with a bit more info to explain my statements above but need to move to inner core...

I think that the people (emphasis on "people" not companies, not brands) that use Twittter best for marketing are authors. Readers want to have that sort of personal relationship with them and some have turned Twitter into a cash printing machine. Neil Gaiman is the one that comes to mind right away. If he mentions a book on Twitter, it instantly sells thousands of copies and if you know anything about the way book publishing works, you realize that weekly sales are a big deal - you'd rather sell no books for three weeks and 1500 books one week than sell 750 books each week for four weeks.

https://twitter.com/neilhimself (1.9 m followers)

Gretchen Rubin (Happiness Project) got a lot of mileage out of Twitter with only 80,000 followers
https://twitter.com/gretchenrubin

My wife follows less well-known authors and thinks that a lot of them get decent response from Twitter if they use it right (she has purchased a fair number of books that she came upon through the author's twitter presence).

But as I say, I think authors can pull it off because
1. people crave a personal connection with authors in a way they don't with Samsung
2. relatively small numbers of pre-publication sales can make a huge difference - momentum is everything in book publishing

Fantomaster seems to do well on Twitter maybe you can get some insights from him?

Neil Gaiman is the one that comes to mind right away.

He's already a best-selling author with a long history of social presence online via his blog.

But you can stick in front of their eyes with promoted tweets

very true - anyone have any stats on that? I've seen twitter talkiing about how many conversions they drive, but not sure I'm convinced!