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How Can YOU Become A Power Tweeter?

Phil Buckley Raleigh SEO Meetup King picture

Raleigh SEO Meetup Twitter Study

If you’ve never attended Phil Buckley’s “most popular SEO meetup in the country” monthly meetup held on the last Tuesday of the month you are missing a great experience. You missed a GREAT event last night.

My friend Mark Traphagen (@Marktraphagen) did a great job live blogging. He also embedded the video from the Google Hangout. Phil’s SEO Meetup is going global virtually these days via Google Hangouts with amazing help from Meeting 3.0 pioneer Nikol Murphy’s company Talking Moose Media.

Tips From Content Marketing Ninjas – = Mark Traphagen’s Live Blog of Raleigh SEO Meetup 3.26

Content Marketing Is The New SEO Twitter Analysis

Great meetings start with awesome topics. Phil created a great one for his 3.26 Meetup – Content Marketing is the new SEO. I signed on to discuss how important Storytelling is to SEO these days due to Google’s angry insistence on always improving website heuristics such as time on site, pages viewed and number of returning visitors.

Amy Lewis (@CommsNinja) signed on to share how she gets engineers at Cisco excited to create content and Casie Gillette (@Casieg) shared amazing tips from her client work as Director of Marketing at KoMarketing.

Watch SEO Raleigh Meetup Google Hangout Video From 3.26

Twitter Analysis

Great event, great audience in the room and virtually via the hangout. I wanted to deep dive into the event’s Twitter patterns to see if some “best practice” guides could be unearthed and debated.

3 Raleigh SEO Twitter Graphs
I manually created a spreadsheet of the top tweeters from the event to answer 3 questions:

  1. Who put the most “impressions” into the market for the event?
  2. How many tweets did top tweeters tweet?
  3. What per tweet characteristic did top tweeters share?

Impressions

I heard a VP Marketing from Warner Brothers say, “We put impressions into the market” to describe their social campaign for The Notebook. I liked the way that sounded. Putting impressions into the market is what social media marketing is built to do. I saw a great stat from Hubspot this morning (scooped to Thank You Revolution) publish only twice a day, a stat once suggested to me, and you reduce engagement by a third.

Since most want to INCREASE engagement putting impressions into the market is a good idea as  the lazy power distribution of impressions generated at SEO Raleigh shows in the chart below:

Raleigh SEO Meetup Atlantic BT Twitter Analysis graphic - impressions

* Note Axis Title should be impressions. Will fix later tonight.

@Rewebcoach(Bobby  Carroll Danko) did a great job of putting impressions into the market last night. Bobby has the largest Twitter following (5,297), but that is CAUSAL. He has a great Twitter following because he understands how to put impressions into the market not the other way around.

Number of Tweets

If I had a dime for each time someone asked me how often they should tweet I would have a free lunch. There is no silver bullet. Tweet when you have something interesting to share.

Understand the EVENT EXCEPTION. The twitter Event Exception is once a #hashtag is established such as #SEOMeetup a community forms.  The chance of your losing 5% of your Twitter following for tweeting 10x more rapidly than normal go WAY DOWN during an event – The Twitter Event with #hashtag exception.

You MUST use the# hashtag to receive the “spam” exemption AND you must recognize and tweet magical “tweetable moments”. Here are a few “magical tweets” from last night’s event:

@ReginaTwine
I can’t hear the jokes so do I awkwardly laugh or not? #seomeetup

Atlantic Creative ‏@accav 19h
.@ScentTrail Now you’re talking about our #wheelhouse #storytelling -Joseph Campbell “A Heroes Journey”. Note: Your about page is the secret.

Amy Lewis ‏@CommsNinja 19h
@yancyscot @1918 @theRab don’t show to a #tweetdown unarmed 😉 #SEOmeetup

Amy Lewis ‏@CommsNinja 15h
RT @NolanEther: How do you get horses to drink? Put them in front of a whiteboard. @CommsNinja #SEOMeetup

Phil Buckley @1918
Would you follow yourself on Twitter? Look at your stream… if not, fix it. – @CommsNinja #SEOMeetup.

Funny, interesting use of cliche and great sound bites become tweets. If you are SPEAKING your job is to think and talk in bullets and bites (very hard) and if you are listening your job is to curate “tweetable moments”. He who curates BEST wins.

Event Tweeting is different. Tweeting at an event is much FASTER and speed makes it hard to remember all the pieces (the #hashtag, @mentions and relevant links). Phil (@1918) did a great job of listening for references and then tweeting in those links, a sure tactic to promote ReTweets, shares and new followers at an event.

If you were at Phil’s SEO Meetup last night you would need to have tweeted between 12 and 25 times just to be in the game. This chart shows number of tweets by power tweeter (blue) vs. the average (red):

SEO Meetup Tweets vs. Average graphic on Atlantic BT blog

My excuse for such a poor performance is I was speaking and the hall monitor made me SIT where I couldn’t tweet (lol). Remember, when you are at an event WITH A HASHTAG you have an exemption to normal TWEET SPAM rule as long as you tweet great stuff and use the event #hashtag.

I keep a window with Search.Twitter.com open and the #eventHashtag looking for great RTs too (less taxing to Retweet and it is impossible to catch every “tweetable” moment in a great event like last night). RT others at an event and then follow them and you have about a 90% chance they follow you back.

Per Tweet Characteristics

I looked at  #hashtag use, links and mentions or “per tweet characteristics”. I honed in on mentions as an important and rarely considered Best Practice to becoming a Power Tweeter. I top the most mentions chart only because I didn’t tweet during the event and was trying to make sure and thank everyone after so I disqualify myself.

Quick Best Practices Tip…before I forget
Reminds me of a VERY IMPORTANT note. Power Tweeters don’t STOP when the event is over nor do they wait for the event to start. Power Tweeters are on the event #hashtag EARLY and OFTEN and they stay on it for hours or even days after the event.

Amy Lewis (@CommsNinja) is the AMAZING WINNER in the mentions per tweet category. Why amazing? Amy was SPEAKING and working that phone like her pet unicorn was sure to be shot if she didn’t grab and SHARE tweetable moments. Phil told me Amy and Casie ROCK and he is RIGHT (as usual).

The Mentions per tweet chart:

Raleigh SEO Meetup Mentions Per tweet graph on Atlantic BT blog

Takeaway here is include more mentions in your tweets. Social media is about being SOCIAL, something Amy could teach a MASTER CLASS on. Mark and Ryan (@TheRab) are no slouches either.

SEO Meetup Twitter Study Summary

The “power tweeters” I put in this study (was going to do everyone but way too much long tail), Tweeted 216 times during the 2 hour event generating 673,442 impressions to 39,421 followers. Top Tweeters tweeted between 12 and 25 times, so 6 to 12 times per hour or about a tweet every two minutes on the high side.

The top 7 Tweeters controlled 80% of the impressions (the 80/20 split point) and there were 312 @mentions (I didn’t differentiate RTs) and 303 #hashtag usages (#SEOMeetup being the #1 by far). 13 tweets mentioned thanks (I only counted use of the words Thanks or Thank You or TY) and there were four “question tweets”.

I think THANK YOU tweets and questions are possible disruptive strategies since they are viral and under used (based on this study). I love questions with links since the human mind must begin to answer the question once asked. If you ask a question and don’t supply the answer curiosity will get the cat. Hard to do in an event format, but not impossible and HIGHLY differentiated based on this data. Something to test at the next SEO Meetup.

SEO Meetup Twitter study spreadsheet on Atlantic BT blog

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