One of the most exciting developments that has occurred on Twitter in the months since I put together Twitter Power has been the release of all sorts of statistics about the site.
We\’ve learned, for example, that many of the site\’s users are middle-aged, high earning business types rather than the kids that create pages on MySpace. We\’ve found that only a small proportion of Twitter\’s users are writing most of the tweets while the others are reading, following and joining in occasionally. And we\’ve discovered that while only a few followers might respond to a tweet – depending on what you write — it\’s reasonable to expect a clickthrough rate on a tweeted link of around one to two percent.
And then, of course, there\’s the figure that everyone pays attention to: the number of followers they\’ve collected.
Obviously that\’s important and it\’s a number that\’s been growing massively as more and more people have joined the site. A handful of top twitterers now have more than a million followers, and in the last eight months, my own follower count has increased almost twenty-fold.
That\’s fun, but it doesn\’t tell me anything about the most important aspect of my Twitter presence.
It doesn\’t tell me anything about the strength of the communities in which I\’m active.
That\’s not a figure that\’s easy to measure. It might be possible to do by counting the number of tweets and replies posted by people following each other but I\’ve a feeling that if it\’s something you have to measure, the community probably isn\’t strong enough.
It is however, something that goes to the heart of what Twitter is all about.
The followers whose tweets you read are individuals. But Twitter is at its most powerful when those individuals are talking to each other, discussing their work and their industry, swapping tips and building connections.
It\’s one thing to read the tweets written by other people in your field but getting the most out of the site means taking part in the conversation and using your tweets to make friends. Of course, those friends won\’t be like the relationships you can create in real life. But they can lead to partnerships, joint ventures, sales, loyal customer bases and a whole host of new opportunities.
Whatever your industry, make sure that you\’re not just building followers but building those relationships and networks too.