Three Types of Twitter Accounts for Marketing

Twitter accounts mainly fall into three categories when it comes to marketing:

1. Engagement Only Accounts
2. Output Only Accounts
3. Mixed Accounts

When using twitter for marketing and maintaining a brand image you need to be aware of these three categories and the value of each.  Let's look at these three categories of twitter account from this perspective.

Engagement Only Content

What is engagement?  Loosely we can define it by interactions with other tweets, this can be via likes, retweets, replies, quotes, and to a lesser extent lists.  An Engagement Only Account is characterised by having a low volume of plain tweets originating from that account, and either a high volume of retweets or a high volume of likes.  From a marketing perspective these accounts are valuable if and only if they have a large number of followers, or a number of followers greater than the number of accounts they themselves follow.  Accounts like this require you to err on the side of caution, these figures can easily be skewed by accounts intended to deliver customer service or setup to automate tweeting or retweeting when certain criteria are met by a program.  It is for this reason it is not advisable to look for these accounts in an automated fashion.

Output Only Accounts

These accounts are mainly corporate accounts although they do sometimes involve individuals who have a product they are trying to sell.  These accounts are characterised by having a high, near exclusive volume of original plain tweets, a very low number of retweets, and often a very low number of liked tweets.  To give a real world example the account @BloombergTV falls into this category.  These accounts are very low value for marketing.  In the case of @BloombergTV, they follow 446 accounts nearly all Bloomberg partners, and have 412,000 followers.  They have liked 142 tweets in the 7 years the account has been active and they have 81,000 tweets nearly exclusively Bloomberg tweets with no retweets other than Bloomberg partners and Bloomberg anchors, the account also does not reply to tweets.  When you consider this account it can be categorised as Output Only because it is intended to be an outlet, a point to post and distribute information.  These accounts are effectively the twitter equivalent of noreply@example.com email addresses.  The only people who will find these accounts useful are people who have an interest in the content, they are not valuable from a marketing perspective and following them won't grow your brand or make others engage with you more, they will only take up space in the number of accounts you follow which not only consumes part of your limit it floods your timeline with content you probably don't want to see anyway.

Mixed Accounts

These are the most valuable accounts of all on twitter.  While it can be argued that the other two represent businesses and organisations, these accounts are those most likely to be everyday users of twitter who should be the primary target of any marketing campaign.  These accounts are characterised by near even distributions of follower to following and a near even distribution of tweets to retweets with a margin either way of around 15%.  While these accounts are the most valuable accounts on twitter they are also the most irritable.  Unsolicited replies from any account perceived to be automated will usually be met with an immediate block.  Retweets and Likes however are less likely to result in this, quote tweeting is a better option as it will let you retain privacy control over the tweets in the event of being blocked**

Conclusion

It should be obvious but should it need to be pointed out, remember these are not infallible categorisations; there will be accounts which break these rules and others which represent outliers which don't fall into any categorisation.  It is also worth repeating these categorisations are relevant to marketing only, there are other types of accounts on twitter not limited to celebrities, fictional characters, trolls, landmarks, parody accounts, spam, and bots among others.

In Summary:

Engagement Only - High Value but be circumspect
- Low volume of original plain tweets relative to other tweets
- High volume of liked tweets or retweets
- High number of followers or more followers than following

Output Only - Lowest Value
- Near exclusive plain tweets
- Very few, if any retweets or retweets only from partners
- Very few, if any, liked tweets
- Very high follower number relative to the following number

Mixed Accounts - Highest Value
- Near even distribution of following and followers
- Near even or 15% margin of tweets to retweets
- High number of liked tweets

* Be aware the number of tweets made and liked tweets on a profile may not accurately represent the number of tweets liked by the profile due to discrepancies in Twitter's counting algorithm caused by privacy changes.

** This is an anomaly and contravenes Twitter's intended power of blocking but it prevents an unfortunate side-affect of the current blocking mechanism.  At present if you retweet an account, which then blocks you, that retweet remains on your profile and visible to everyone else except you.  This isn't ideal especially since it effectively means you can't remove the retweet.  Using Quote tweets rather than simple retweets allows you to retain control of the tweet on your profile, should the other account block you the quote tweet will still be visible to you but the embedded tweet won't be, regardless this allows you to delete the quoted tweet removing it from your profile.