Twitter Statistics: Your Guide to Growing a Brand on Twitter

It’s a common misconception that Twitter doesn’t represent a good return on investment. For small start-up businesses it’s an excellent way to reach potential customers and grow a brand. The so-called ‘social media scientist’ Dan Zarrella is an expert in all things social. He’s published a number of ways that both small start-ups and established brands can extend their reach using Twitter on his blog.

How can your brand get noticed among the millions tweeting every day? Here are some of his best tips – all of which can be found on DanZarrella.com.

Use pictures

Want your tweets to reach more people? Make sure you’re putting plenty of pictures in. Research by Zarrella showed that pictures on Twitter increased retweets by up to 94%.

However, incorporating images from other social networks might help you to grow your social reach, but it appears to be a turn off in terms of retweets. If your tweet contains a link to Instagram or Facebook it will typically enjoy 42% and 47% less retweets respectively.

Use calls to action

As with other aspects of the marketing world, a call to action will have an effect on how users respond to your tweets. Another study showed that various calls to action resulted in retweets.

While it’s true that ‘please help’ and ‘please retweet’ may not work tonally for a number of tweets, there’s no doubt that including the terms can greatly increase visibility.

Get your characters right

It’s well known that a character limit for Twitter post is 140, but research shows that you may as well stop at 120.

The chance of getting a retweet will climb steadily up to around 120 characters, but after that a tweet’s effectiveness plummets dramatically. The optimum length seems to be between 100 and 115 characters – tweets in this range are 34% more likely to be retweeted than any others.

Tweet at the weekends

Research has shown that people are 17% more receptive to brands on Twitter at weekends. Monday, in particular, is a poor day when it comes to generating click throughs.

So if you’re planning on leaving the office over the weekend, have a think and get some tweets scheduled.

….or later in the day

Tweeting in the morning seems to be a bit of a no-go – except from during the traditional commuting hours.

In the afternoons, tweets enjoyed generally positive click through rates and only stopped becoming effective during the traditional ‘dinner time’ between 6 and 7PM.

Tweet action words

A classic rule of copywriting has been to include plenty of ‘action’ words like verbs and adverbs. And the stats show that’s just as true on Twitter as it is in other classic communications.

Forceful language like adverbs and verbs had a positive effect on click-through rates, compared to nouns and adjectives, which had a negative effect.

Of course, none of this is true if you have data to explain otherwise

After all, there’s no social data quite like your own brand’s social data. While these are all essential pointers, and could well be true for you, if you can track your social activity find evidence that suggests otherwise then you should run with it.

If you’re looking for seamless social integration for your start-up brand, PHP Genie can help. Talk to us about how we can build a fully-responsive, engaging site today – call 01633 415 364 or email wish@thegenielab.com