Ignore Twitter at Your Peril

The world’s best organic social media network isn’t Facebook or Instagram. It’s Twitter.

Facebook used to show up with a softball to a hardball game. Now it doesn’t even bring a ball.

I’m going to show you a new case study involving Twitter that will blow your mind. But first let me tell you something about Facebook.

Everybody knows social media marketing can be a perfect way to make an impression with audiences that can be difficult to find. Or, more accurately, difficult to find without wasting a lot of money targeting people who are not relevant.

Ironically, everybody knows this because everybody is on Facebook. But one thing a lot of people don’t know (unless you’re in the media business) is that Facebook only surfaces 1 to 6% of what you publish to your audience.

Think about that.

If you have 1,000 friends, only 60 of them will get the “Steve Yanor shared a post” notification. Or, if you have a page with 50,000 fans maybe 3,000 of them will see your post.

A lot of people don’t know that Facebook doesn’t automatically show your content to everyone. In fact, every year they show less and less.

Facebook pulled off the largest bait and switch in the history of mankind.

It’s so bad now that posting on Facebook without having a budget to boost your posts is a waste of time.

One Paragraph Railing Against Facebook

I could rail against Facebook all day. And on my agency’s Facebook page, I do. This gives Facebook a perfectly good reason to restrict my organic reach on Instagram, too, but hey, we’re living in an age when you have to stand by your principles. If a social media agency won’t rail against Facebook’s organic reach, who will?

We DO LOVE Facebook ads, though. Love them!

What really puzzles me is why brands keep pouring hard-earned money into a platform that won’t show the posts to anyone without paying for it?

Why spend a dime on a platform that’s only going to show your posts to 6% of your audience — people who already know you?

Playing Organic Hardball With Twitter

If you’re a brand (or in charge of a brand) you don’t have much choice but to use social media. I mean, you’re crazy if you don’t.

Social media is such a huge opportunity. It has massive audiences. It influences purchases. It provides multiple data points to people who use the internet to research purchases. Not to mention the creative possibilities! The targeting. The retail investors. The VCs. The entrepreneurs. I could go on and on.

The thing is, I just saw a Twitter account with 24 followers (it’s new) get 1,940 clicks over a three day period. Without paying one cent for ads.

I’m here to set the record straight about Twitter. I’m going to let the data do the talking.

Just because we’re, like, the only social media agency in Canada that pushes Twitter on our clients doesn’t mean we think Twitter is a fit for everyone. No. Twitter can be a tough slog. It can appear as if nothing is happening.

But just because it looks as if nothing is happening doesn’t mean that nothing is happening!

Walk Softly And Carry A Big Tweet

We have a client that provides career guidance and coaching for university students. Selling career coaching to students is not easy; it’s a long sell involving many data points on the prospect’s journey.

The other factor is that it’s not the students who pay for the service. It’s the parents that pay.

For this client we created a series of ads to run on Facebook and Instagram. We need a nice base of steady traffic and Facebook does a pretty good job of driving traffic.

The second component of the campaign is a calendar of content that revolves "organically" on Twitter and Facebook. Organically means we're just posting content on Facebook and Twitter without paying for it.

Combining paid social ads with organic content works well.

Our first week into the Twitter calendar (we tweet three times a day, every day) we found that the tweets were doing remarkably well.

I mean, you wouldn’t know the tweets were doing remarkably well unless you were monitoring the analytics. Thankfully we monitor analytics!

Thousands of clicks from a single week of tweets?

This is a great example of how still waters run deep. Look at this perfectly innocent little tweet:

This tweet does not look like anything special. It has only two retweets and one like. Big whoop, right? So why am I showing you this?

Here’s why. Check out the analytics behind this tweet:

566 clicks! Are you kidding me? Where else are you going to get 566 clicks for free?

So now you want to know how many followers this account has. To get 566 clicks it must have 100,000 followers. How big is this Twitter account?

28 followers!? In the twittersphere this account isn’t even a speck of dust! It’s nothing.

Yet there it is, a tweet with 566 clicks from an account with 28 followers.

But this story does not end here. Over a seven day period we find several examples of other innocent looking tweets that are raining clicks:

One thousand clicks! How much would that cost you on Facebook? Probably $1,000.

We found more examples of 100+ clicks in the seven day time frame but you get the point. This is a Twitter account with barely any followers that pulled in 2,000 clicks in three days.

Gotta love Twitter.

Try that with Facebook or Instagram

What this data shows is that even with a small Twitter account, you can reach a big target audience:

This is the Twitter account’s analytics the following week. We didn’t see how well these tweets were doing until a week later. As soon as we did, we retweeted the tweets.

As you can see, an account with 28 followers on Twitter can still reach 5,600 people in a week!

For those of you starting to plan your Fall and Christmas campaigns, don’t forget about Twitter. When it comes to organic social, it's the best game in town.

Happy tweeting!

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Thanks to Heather Claridge and FUSE Careers for permission to use this material.