PR and the Social Web

When using Twittercounter recently I came across a great example showing that one of the most effective ways to build a following on Twitter is simply to provide content or put another way to tweet more.

I’d noticed in December that one of the people I follow, an inveterate tweeter had virtually stopped posting.

This is a graph that combines the number of daily tweets (orange bars) with follower numbers (red line).  The individual in question posts an average of around 20 tweets a day peaking at a hefty 75.  Look what happened when he stopped.  His net followers started dropping away immediately, then when his micro-blogging mojo returned in January follower numbers started growing again.

It goes to show that what’s true for blogging is true for its micro-me; if you want traffic then you’ve got to have content.

Twitter has launched its advertising package with promoted tweets, promoted trends and promoted accounts available to all.  Whilst in various ways users have been able to boost their follower numbers for some time, now followers can simply be purchased via twitter itself, something that fundamentally alters the ecosystem.

“Whether you’re gearing up for a big product release or event, or just looking to expand your presence online, building a strong base of Twitter followers who will share your content and amplify your message makes all the difference…unlike a “like” action, a new follower stays with you.” says the twitter ad blurb.

It will be interesting to see how this pans out for Twitter.  My hunch is that it will turn established users away.  The growth of Twitter has been phenomenal, according to the official blog there have been 25 billion tweets this year.  That’s a pretty stunning total given that at the start of the year 7.3 billion tweets had been posted in three and a half years.   However the pace of growth is slowing.  There were 5 billion tweets between the 31st July and the 20th September, that’s 50 days. It took 52 days for another five billion to be posted.  Twitter has made it much more difficult to monitor tweet volume since they moved away from sequential numbering of tweets.

So if twitter has flatlined and in terms of tweet volume it appears that it has, adding adverts to our twitter stream is hardly likely to  boost loyalty and usage.

Twitter has been hovering close to milestone of the 1000 tweets a second for several days and in the last couple of days has broken through the barrier several times.  The number of tweets per second stayed above that figure between 2pm and 4pm UTC on Tuesday and passed it again at a similar time yesterday.

Twitter has also broken through another barrier, clocking up over 2 billion tweets in a month for the first time since its inception.  At midnight last night the figure was over 2.3 billion for June.

I verified the score for June using the unique twitter ID number that ever tweet carries.  These numbers are sequential so it makes the calculation straightforward. At midday on the 1st June Lance Armstrong tweeted “Hello June“.  Clearly this was not the first tweet of the day, but it was good enough for an accurate estimate.  The ID figure of 15162027303 for that tweet suggests that the first tweet in June was close to the 15130000000 mark.  Gigatweet had the last tweet in June at around test number at around 17440000000.   Although claims were made that the two billion barrier was passed in May the actual figure for that month was 1.99 billion.

There were suggestions late last year that Twitter had ‘jumped the shark’ but an apparent stalling in the numbers using twitter.com was simply caused by users switching to third-party applications.  Gigatweet also estimates that the 20 billionth tweet will be posted in just a month’s time on the 1st August.