Being heard on Twitter

Twitter is a bit like standing in a crowd and tweeting is like speaking out loud.  The people that follow you are paying attention to you and the people that aren't following you are just looking around.  The more people someone is following - that is the more people in the crowd they are paying attention to - the harder it becomes for them to hear what you are saying.

In practice this can be explained by looking at a typical twitter user.  If they are following more than a given number of people, let's say 60, then provided those people all make one tweet per hour, then that person sees 60 tweets per hour in their timeline.  The more those people tweet the more the timeline fills up.  The longer they go in between checking their timeline the more tweets still that amount there.

If:

- You follow 60 people
- They each tweet once per hour on average
- You go 24 hours between checking your timeline

Then:

You can expect to find 1,440 tweets waiting for you when you finally decide to check it.  Follow more people and that number increases.  Tweeting once per hour is quite unrealistic for a statistical average.  Even if the majority of the people you follow don't tweet much they will likely surpass that on average alone, further to this there are twitter power users who tweet a lot more than this. 

In order to end up in Twitter jail [temporary revocation of capacity to tweet imposed by twitter as an anti-spam mechanism] you need to post 100 tweets per hour or 1,000 tweets per day on average - whichever you hit first.

If you then consider the 90-9-1 rule and apply it to the activity of these users you could argue:

If:

- You follow 100 people
- 1% of those people post 1,000 tweets per day on average
- 9% of those people post 100 tweets per day on average
- 90% of those people post 1 tweet per hour on average
- You go 24 hours between checking your timeline

Then:

You can expect to find around 4,060 tweets waiting for you when you do finally check it.

Of course there will be users who check twitter more than once a day - most probably would.  But the number of times within each hour on average does not reduce the readability of tweets, the only reduction is the amount of time between your last check and your next check of twitter.  Assuming you checked it all the time when you were awake to try and keep up and assuming you got 8 hours sleep you would still end up with approximately 1,353 tweets to catch up on due to falling asleep.

This is only a token demonstration of the Maths that go into tweet "exposure" and the figures here were deliberately  chosen to be easy to calculate they are not representative of a real world example.  For one people on twitter tend to follow others who tweet a lot, they tend not to follow people who hardly tweet at all - that further increases the number above.  For another, the number of people that you follow will likely be much higher than those given above, these are reflective of a relatively new account.  If you have been using twitter for some time then the number of people you follow is much more likely to be in the hundreds or even in the thousands which throws all of the above into minuscule proportions compared to the reality of the numbers you will be dealing with.

So how do you get heard on twitter?  Well for companies that want to market something the real options are either to pay for prominent tweet placement - sponsored tweets - or to try and achieve success at viral marketing through trending.  Both are not easy to achieve as in the case of sponsored tweets there will be a lot of people that just ignore them and a lot more who use services like AdBlock Plus which hides them altogether.

The only effective way of being heard on twitter is through engagement.  That means you have to actually speak to people as well as posting regular tweets and that involves using @ mentions and starting actual conversations with people.  It may be a radical concept for you to understand but to be successful at social networking you have to be social.

Being social can involve one on one interaction as described above or it can involve integrating into an existing community.  In this regard there are quite a few on twitter.  There are the most obvious fandoms which centre around the cult of celebrity.  There are others devoted to specific causes.  There are political groups, music groups, even porn related groups commonly referred to as "twitter after dark".  There's also the cliques that you can try and break into.  Just like high school there are small groups of twitter accounts that all follow each other - integrating there is not easy however and newcomers will often be met with hostility.

If you're reading this and getting the feeling like twitter is high school all over again, you're not far wrong.  The people on twitter who are massively popular with millions of followers didn't become popular because of twitter, it's just another way to let people worship them.  Those with thousands of followers typically act in much the same way with the exception that they usually have no other claim to fame than being twitter famous.  There's also a lot to be said about "anons" or anonymous twitter users who don't share any detail about their real identity, most of these people have more than one account on the platform and there is substantial disparity between their accounts.

What all this comes down to is one simple question - do you want to be yourself or do you want to be popular on twitter?  If the answer is that you want to be yourself then you need to give up chasing numbers and do just that - be yourself.  If the answer is that you want to be popular on twitter then you'll have to consider how far you want to go to get it.  It is very rare that you will get very far being yourself and not playing a character.  Twitter is at the end of the day a game, and if you want to win then you need to know how to play it, who you need on your team, who you are ready to play against and who you can handle losing to should it come to that.  I know several anons whose tweets have absolutely no reflection on who they are as a person outside twitter.  Much the same way that many youtubers are nothing like their online persona.  If you want to make it on twitter you need to be Regina George.  You need to be the bitch that can be nice to someone you hate and smile as you kill.

If you want to be popular then tweet all you want, about whatever you want, but remember it doesn't help you at all unless you are being heard on twitter.