WebProNews

Tag: tweeting

  • People Who Tweet While Driving Are Doing It ‘All the Time’, God Help Us

    AT&T has been running its “It Can Wait” campaign for a few years now, shining a light on the country’s continued problem with distracted driving. Every so often it puts out a survey and every time the result come back it’s like oh my god what the hell are people doing.

    First things first – 61 percent of people say they’re still texting and driving. That’s obscene. Stop texting and driving. Whatever you have to say is not that important, I assure you. Even if you’re texting a friend to implore them to stop texting while driving. That’s still not a good reason to text and drive.

    But we knew people are texting and driving. Every recent survey confirms this. AT&T’s new survey looked at other smartphone-related activities and found the following:

    Smartphone activities people say they do while driving include:

    • Text (61%)
    • Email (33%)
    • Surf the net (28%)
    • Facebook (27%)
    • Snap a selfie/photo (17%)
    • Twitter (14%)
    • Instagram3 (14%)
    • Shoot a video (12%)
    • Snapchat (11%)
    • Video chat (10%)

    God help us all.

    But wait, there’s more.

    “30% of people who post to Twitter while driving do it ‘all the time.’”

    At least when you’re texting, there’s a recipient in mind. Someone is likely going to read/give a shit about your message. On Twitter, you’re just sending out 140-character farts into a vacuous netherworld populated by people who couldn’t give less of a shit about your Chipotle. Tweeting while driving has to be the most self-absorbed activity on the planet.

    Anyway, carry on. Just keep your eyes out for those who aren’t.

  • 4 Ways to Improve Your Twitter Strategy

    4 Ways to Improve Your Twitter Strategy

    A few months ago my friend Dr. Ben Hanna led an extensive statistical study to discover the optimal tweeting strategy by running matched tests of tweets over a period of weeks. He uncovered some very interesting ideas that will help you get more out of every tweet!

    Tweet quality versus tweet quantity – The study looked at the relevant importance of tweeting only when you had something really interesting to pass along (quality focus) versus a strategy of tweeting with frequency to make sure your content was always in front of your audience (quantity focus). The study showed tweet quality is MUCH more important than quantity.  Tweets that provided a higher average number of clicks per tweet with a track-able link correlated to higher follower growth.

    I guess this finding verifies my hunch. People who tweet on a schedule just strike me as unapproachable and disconnected.  While the study definitely verified the “quality” strategy, you still have to be in the game – average tweets/day during their testing ranged from 2.9 to 11.0.

    The first words are critical – At 140 characters, tweets are like headlines and people scan them quickly.  If you want to catch someone’s eye, think like an advertising copy writer and make sure that either the main topic keywords or a number/statistic are found in the first 3-5 words.

    The results also recommended against using the standard retweet style (i.e. “RT @markwschaefer: …” to start the tweet), instead shift attribution to the end of the tweet (i.e. “… via @markwschaefer”) so people can concentrate on the first words.

    Quality tweets live four days – If you measure the lifespan of a tweet by the number of days on which it receives at least one click, then tweets don’t live very long. On average, tweets with a clickable link received at least one click on four separate days with a range of one day (not a very popular tweet) to 23 days (very popular content).

    Optimal time between tweets – In a study examining the number of clicks on business-related tweets, the optimal space between business tweets to attract the most clicks is either 31-60 minutes or 2-3 hours. Tightly packed tweets just don’t appear to attract as much attention as tweets with more space between them. The study really couldn’t explain the bi-modal distribution. The cause of the dip in click activity for tweets between 61 and 120 minutes is uncertain.

    I found this research interesting and hope it will help you hit your tweet-spot on Twitter!  Any surprises?  What do you think makes a tweet work?

  • Twitter Changes the Update Button to “Tweet”

    When Twitter users go to post a new tweet, they have in the past used a button that says "update" (at least from Twitter.com…that varies when you get into all the different apps Twitter users use). Now, that button says "Tweet".

    We’re not sure exactly when the change was made, but it appears to have been very recently, as there is quite an outpour of Tweets from users mentioning that they are now seeing the "tweet" button. Perhaps this is Twitter way of asserting some kind of ownership of the word and the brand that it carries.

    Tweet Button

    Twitter made "retweeting" an official feature last year, after the community-born practice grew to mainstream use.

    Interestingly, Retweet.com just sold for $250,000 this week.

    The tweet button isn’t the only new thing going on with Twitter’s website this week. Twitter is currently in the process of rolling out geolocation features on the site, after having had such capabilities available via the API since November.

    Twitter CEO Evan Williams will be speaking at SXSW early next week (WebProNews will be there covering it). We may get more interesting news from the company there (some expect an ad platform to be announced).

    Update: Looks like some have noticed this for at least a couple days.