What is the most important metric you should know about your Twitter followers?
The following answers are provided by members of Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), an invite-only organization comprised of the world’smost promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, YEC recently launched StartupCollective, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses.
1. Interaction
As an early adopter and somebody with a large following on Twitter, I carefully track the level of interaction that I generate through my tweets. To me that is the most important metric. I carefully track how many retweets, favorites and replies I generate per tweet in a spreadsheet.
– Timothy Schmidt, WebsiteRescue
2. Influence
By analyzing a follower’s “influence” you’re effectively evaluating a number of things: their number of followers, their level of activity and the potential network you have if your content is shared. We use Followerwonk to measure a Twitter follower’s influence, and to identify who among our followers we need to actively engage with.
3. Conversation
It’s easy to have tens or hundreds of thousands of followers but zero conversation. Twitter is a network that connects you to people, and if all you’re doing is tweeting links or photos without actually talking to people, it’s useless. In my opinion, the most important metric is how many conversations you’re having.
4. Potential Reach
Keeping track of the level of engagement (organic mentions, @replies) you or your brand’s content output is receiving combined with the potential reach (the combined reach of RTs, favorites and organic mentions) is the key to unlocking the power of Twitter.
– Alex Frias, Track Marketing Group
5. Who Is Following You
Knowing your followers are actual people with a vested interest in your brand is crucial. Otherwise, you might be talking to the wrong audience — or worse, no one at all.
– Blake Miller, Think Big Partners
6. Average Number of People Your Followers Follow
It doesn’t matter if I have a million people following me on Twitter if they don’t hear what I have to say. Ironically, one way to make sure you’re actually getting heard by your audience is to have followers who are only following a small number of people. If they’re following several thousand accounts, you’re probably not being listened to!
– Mike Seiman, CPXi
7. Engagement
Quality always trumps quantity. If your followers are not engaged, then they’re useless. You will always have a group of followers who are super engaged and responsive to every tweet. You need to build a personal connection with those and strengthen that relationship. Thank those who favorite or retweet your tweets. Interact with those who mention you. It’s all about trust.
8. Timing
You can have the best tweet in the world, but if your followers aren’t on Twitter they might miss it. Track your tweets or use a tool likeTweriod to figure out when your followers are most active. This way you can schedule your best tweets in time with your followers’ activity.