Tweeting’s sweetest on Tuesdays
One Friday afternoon in January 2009 the hashtag #followfriday spread like wildfire on Twitter. It immediately became shorthand for recommending the most interesting “tweeps” followed at the end of the week. But Ingage Networks research suggests that more than 85 per cent of accounts experience an increase in followers on Tuesdays at noon, rather than Fridays, which only feature third, following behind Mondays at 9am. Marketing software vendor HubSpot found that the ideal number of tweets per day is 22 – in a study of 1.6m Twitter users those who tweet between 10 and 50 times a day have more followers on average than those who tweet more or less. The content that works best for B2B marketers is direct engagement with other “tweeple” (using @ replies) and sharing educational articles or links, according to Ingage. Negative sentiment about competitors was the content most likely to lose you followers.
Worst-case scenario?
When a Vodafone employee posted an obscene, homophobic tweet on the company Twitter page, it seemed as if the social media sceptics had been proved right. But Vodafone’s swift response – apologies from all of the other Vodafone staff members on Twitter, owning up to the mistake and stating that it was being dealt with internally – produced unexpected results. The VodafoneUK Twitter account registered a sharp increase in followers after the unfortunate tweet was published, almost twice that of a normal day (>377 compared to >215 on average). But controversial tweeting probably isn’t a wise strategic move. Social media chat about your company will happen whether you encourage it or not – the Google Sidewiki application allows users to post publicly visible comments against your site – and any disasters can be dealt with if they arise.
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