One of my survey questions from my research project on Twitter usage was:
“How do you typically find out that a business / nonprofit organization that you’re interested in has a Twitter account?”
The response options were:
Website – The website of the business
Followers – Discovered the business twitter account via someone I follow on twitter
Search – Searching for the business by name using google or search.twitter.com
Testing – Trying the username of the business as a twitter username and seeing if it exists
Recommendation – Twitter’s built-in “who to follow” recommendation tool
Card – Business card that had the twitter username on it
Other – Word of mouth, in person, or other method of discovery
The most popular response among the 141 respondents was discovering the business / nonprofit organization’s twitter account via their own website (~61%), followed by discovering it through someone they already follow on twitter (~59%). That was about what I expected, but it does underscore the importance of businesses including a link to their twitter account on their main website. Some companies bury that information in an “about us” or “contact us” page where potential followers may not see it.
I didn’t go into further detail about how they found out about the account via their followers because the most common method is seeing a retweet that mentions the business / nonprofit organization’s account. One good measure of the effectiveness of an organization’s social media strategy is the number of times their tweets are retweeted to a larger audience of people who may not already be following the account. Some businesses focus solely on writing tweets that are specific to their business, but those aren’t necessarily the tweets that people will view as worthy of recirculating among their followers.
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