You see that they have numerous followers, are following many, and have done 52,823 tweets.

To some people that would be impressive.  To others it would be oppressive.

To find out whether to follow them back you have to go through a process of looking at their profile and getting a feel for what they’ve been tweeting about recently.  Within the first half of Monday they (the example in the screenshot above) had sent out 20 tweets.   For example:

You would have to make a judgement call on whether their tweets are the types of thing that are useful to you and whether you’d want them filling up your stream of tweets.  Personally, I wouldn’t – purely because it’s just too much.   We all have too much to fit into the same 24 hours we are given each day and people who tweet too often can be perceived as contributing to information overload.

Twitter themselves could make our life easier.  Perhaps, instead of the standard email they send when someone follows you, they could add a bit more information such as:

Average tweets per day

Average times retweeted per day

That information would give you a good indication of how many tweets you’d likely be receiving (if you followed them) and also give you a feel for how well their tweets are received and then retweeted.  So, if you saw figures like this below, you’d not get a particularly warm feeling about the quality of what they’re tweeting about …

Average tweets per day: 50

Average times retweeted per day: 5

However, turn this on its head and it may look worth investigating in more depth:

Average tweets per day: 50

Average times retweeted per day: 250

As information overload continues to grow, those of us in business are going to focus more and more on how we can get a concise view of the information available.  Companies like Twitter have the ability to make our lives easier and, if they really thought about it, could offer a great range of premium level add-ons, for a modest fee, that would be well worth the money.

It started with a Custwin blog about using keywords in a domain name for SEO benefits that was picked up by Jo Dodds and tweeted onto her own followers.  You can see that tweet below …

Jo has a strong following (and if you’re interested in social media and blogging then you should follow her on twitter – @jododds and via her website http://jododdssocialmedia.com/).

That tweet brought 38 eyeballs to the blog during that day.  That’s 19 people (assuming all those people had two eyes).   Some of those 19 people went on to look at other blogs and a few went deeper into the Custwin website.

What’s been achieved there is an increased awareness of the Custwin name.  Although we don’t expect any of those people to be rushing to sign up for our services, we know that if they see the Custwin name in the future, then they may become receptive to interacting in some way (perhaps via signing up for the newsletter or maybe more).

What we see here is someone (Jo) who is very much known to be a ‘giver’, i.e. she shares her knowledge to many people, typically via social media, which builds trust in her own brand.  When Jo then expresses agreement with something someone else says (e.g. our blog) then her followers can view that as being an endorsement, which makes them more likely to click through to the blog than if such information was presented to them ‘cold’ from another source.

There are three key points here …

1. Blogging useful information is what builds trust.
2. Using systems like Twitter to impart that information is common sense.
3. Being linked to people who have a similar mindset leads to further views of the material you’ve produced.

Putting figures on it we know that most people are happy to grab free information but that very few actually go a step further to use the products or services on offer.  However, the more that trust is built up, the higher the potential to gain business from just the small percentage of people who could become business at some point in the future.

Whatever type of business you’re in it’s likely that you could have something worth blogging about, even if it’s fairly infrequent (e.g. 2-4 times a month).  If it’s useful and not a sales pitch then people will want to keep reading what you produce.

If you’re producing blogs at the moment and are tweeting those out, are you measuring the numbers of people who click through to look at what you’ve written?  If not, you should be – it will tell you a lot about how well you’re engaging with your audience.

But how often does that happen, and how ‘useful’ for business is that retweet?

Let’s say (using round numbers) you send out 100 tweets in a month.  How many times do those tweets get retweeted?  What percentage return on investment do you get out of the tweets you made, which presumably are quite business-oriented?

Definition of a good result

You tweet something and more than one person retweets it.

Definition of a poor result/bad timing

No-one interacts with your tweet.

With September upon us, here’s something you can try and it’s really easy as long as you’re keeping an eye on who is retweeting you …

1. Send out tweets as normal.
2. Note down the numbers of retweets you get, discarding any that you think are rubbish (e.g. automated stuff).
3. After the month add up all the retweets and compare to the overall tweets.

If you’ve sent out 100 tweets and overall, you’ve been retweeted 100 times then you’re heading in the right direction.  If you’ve been retweeted more, even better.

But what if your percentage of retweets is below what you’d hoped for?  What may that say about your tweets?

Of course, this isn’t an exact science because there are many people in business who send out a mixture of tweet types, often jokey/friendly stuff, and while some people may respond to such tweets, many won’t.  That doesn’t take away the value of the tweets though – I know many people who tweet what can most kindly be described as ‘a waste of time’ but those tweets put personality into them and they benefit in other ways.

As an overall experiment though, it may interest you to assess how people interact with your tweets over a period of time.  If you can measure it and you don’t like the results then you have the opportunity to make beneficial changes.

There are various tools you can use to see the times of day and days of week when your followers are most online and when they’re interacting with you the most.   For example, the view below shows that on weekdays most @custwin followers are significantly online from 9am to about 4pm, with a lull around the 2pm period …

That information came from using the free analysis service of www.tweriod.com.  Another view that comes from the same service shows the times of day of the last 600 tweets @custwin was mentioned in (again, on weekdays).   This view shows a peak around 10am – 12pm …

Using systems like Tweriod you can cut the data in various ways and it may imply that there is a time of day and times of the week that most followers are active and are also responsive to tweets.  However, statistics can be very deceptive.

In the case of @custwin there’s not a huge amount of active tweeting going on and usually the tweets are about new blogs that have been written, with those tending to go out between 10am and 2pm.  Therefore, the figures aren’t really that useful because it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work out that most tweeters are going to be more active between 9am and 5pm and so they’re likely to respond to tweets that go out from @custwin between 10am and 2pm.

But is that necessarily the best time to be active on Twitter?  Just because the tweets about the Custwin blogs go out during core working hours doesn’t necessarily mean it’s actually the best time to send them – it just happens to be when most followers are active on Twitter.   It could well be that the followers who are likely to interact more/take more attention of the tweets focus their Twitter time at the front and back ends of each day when there’s a bit more breathing space away from the chaos of work.  Those people being able to take a more leisurely look at what’s being tweeted can often have a stronger impact than if they saw it during the core working day.

In the world of website statistics analytics this is very common because people are often researching (things they’re going to buy) during the day (typically, while at work) but don’t buy at that time.  The website statistics then imply that poor results (visitors vs buyers) are gained during the day.  What then happens is that those same people go back to the websites in the evening and will then buy at that time.  This can have the reverse effect on website statistics because there may appear to be a much larger proportion of buyers compared to the smaller number of website visitors in an evening.    As I said, statistics can be very deceptive.

So when is the right time to send tweets?  That very much depends on your style of tweeting.  If you’re sending out a mixture of business and personal tweets then systems such as Tweriod won’t really help you because the interaction levels could be a mixture of social and work.  However, if you use Twitter primarily for ‘work’ tweets then you have more scope to experiment and Tweriod could be useful.  In the first instance you could use Tweriod to analyse the status of your Twitter activity as it currently stands.   Over the following month you could alter your tweeting activity to see whether you get better interaction at different times of the day and a month later the differences in the graphs could be quite illuminating.

As an example, we could start sending out most @custwin tweets (highlighting new blogs) in the evenings for a whole month.  OK, it could well reduce our rate of reading and interaction but at the same time the quality of interaction could outweigh the pure numbers of people viewing and interacting with what we’re tweeting.  And after doing that we could try another experiment.   It’s probably still the case that the better interactions are happening during core working hours but as with everything, it’s sometimes worth thinking outside the norm to see what happens.

Well before Facebook, Twitter, and others were born, the book gave insights into how to handle information overload but nowadays it’s of little use as new strategies are needed.  The tweet below (and many similar) is what reminded me about the book and led to the title of this blog …

We all get followers on Twitter and it’s time-consuming making a decision on who to follow back.  Sometimes, as in the screenshot above, it’s a fairly easy decision to make – the bloke can apparently double my productivity and will share everyone he knows if I follow him.   Sounds great until you see that he’s made 26 tweets.   Perhaps he just doesn’t know an awful lot eh?

He’s fairly typical of many on Twitter – follow loads of people, get (dumb) followers back, and yet tweet hardly anything.  His tweets as a percentage of his followers is just under 1%   Putting aside the insanity that people would follow him blindly, my issue here is with Twitter itself not helping me to manage what is unnecessary information overload.

Suppose I could configure my Twitter account (or other interfaces that I use) so that next to each follow alert, or even next to any Twitter user I happen to look up, it gives me some further insights into the tweeter.   Such insights I’d be interested in ‘at-a-glance’ would be:

• Tweets as a percentage of followers.
• Average numbers of tweets over a period of time (e.g. X per month).
• Percentage of retweets over a period of time (e.g. X% of their followers retweet X% of the time).  This gives me an indication of the value of what they’re tweeting.
• Percentage of reciprocal follows (i.e. you follow me and I’ll follow you blindly back).

What if Twitter allowed me to see such information (and possibly other information) easily and also allowed me to tweak parameters so that people are ‘traffic lighted’.

So, as an example, let’s say I’d consider a ‘green light’ to be someone who had tweets that are retweeted by at least 10% of their followers, at least 10% of the time.  In a similar way, let’s say that a ‘red light’ would be someone who had a small proportion of their tweets retweeted and always by the same people.  An amber light would be somewhere in the middle.

Taking that traffic lighting concept and applying it to different criteria, any time I receive a follow alert or I’m looking at a Twitter profile, the system knows what matters to me and gives me a series of red, amber, and green lights, that match up with my personal preferences.  How fantastic would that be!

Let’s look at the alternative.

I receive a follow alert that’s not as obviously useless to me as the Dr Alex one in the screenshot.   The person has made a reasonable number of tweets and doesn’t seem to be crazily attracting followers while following anything with an @ before it.   I could invest my time going to look at their profile and browse through some of their tweets.  That’d only take under a minute maximum.   But it’s still time being eaten up in something that may be no good to me at all.

If the Twitter system was cleverer I could have my traffic lighting system in place to help me make instant decisions.  I still have the option to ignore what the traffic lights tell me, but I’m still overall saving time.

Would I pay a moderate sum for such a ‘premium’ service?   Of course I would!   Let’s say I save 1 minute a day, 5 days a week, roughly 50 weeks of the year.  That’s over 4 hours saved in a year.  How much is 4 hours of my time worth?   Probably a lot more than the cost of a service that makes my life easier and helps with information overload.

The level of information available to us is undoubtedly fantastic but at the same time it’s also killing our ability to progress.  Those that supply us with the tools that provide information (e.g. Twitter as a company) could perhaps be innovating a bit more to make our lives easier while possibly also generating new revenue streams for themselves.

In my case I look up their profile to see what they’ve been tweeting about and then judge whether it’d be worth following them back.   That’s probably what most people do – quality, not quantity of following being the emphasis.

Sometimes I get followers who have hundreds of followers themselves and are following hundreds of others …. but they’ve only sent a handful of tweets.  This may be because they don’t have a lot to say or they may be quite new to Twitter but the message is confusing.   Here’s one I saw today:

To have sent only 27 tweets and have 646 followers doesn’t add up.  The assumption is that they’re just using a system (automated or otherwise) to follow numerous people in the hopes that they’ll be followed back.  And guess what, it sort of works for them – 646 followers all following on the basis of a handful of tweets.

I looked at the tweets and although I’m sure they may have plenty useful to say at some stage, it didn’t come out in those tweets.  In such cases I don’t follow back.  Each of those people have one chance to grab my attention and is the initial follow blows that chance then they’ve achieved nothing (except the dimwits who follow anyone that follows them).

What people like that should be doing is initially building up a bank of tweets worth looking at (i.e. are useful) and only then go on a mission to connect to people – that way they should have more success in grabbing attention.

But could we perhaps take this a step further?  We’re at the end of January and we all will have been in contact with various people, online and offline.  We may have fired off  some #followfriday tweets but who has really stood out in the past month?  Which one person has grabbed your attention more than anyone else?

Do we perhaps have the potential to start a #followmonth concept so that we can put the real stand-out people up there as being our favourite for the previous month.   Just one person/company per month, for up to 12 months in a year, along with a reason why they’re worth following.

Here’s a hypothetical example (oh, if only …) …

#followfebruary @custwin – because they give out useful and free website success advice without a heavy sales pitch.

Wouldn’t it be interesting if such a concept caught on in a similar way to how #followfriday did.  What would be more interesting would be whether Google would attribute more credibility to such #followmonth tags.   We assume that Google doesn’t allow tweets to have much (if any) impact on SEO but it wouldn’t be hard for Google to pick up on #followmonth tweets and determine if they’re genuine, and, knowing that the tweeter is only promoting one person/company to follow per month, there’s a bit more ‘quality’ linked to the endorsement.

I know what you’re thinking: spammers would get round it.  Or would they?  If Google saw something like the following it’d quickly smell a rat and would discount the multiple same, or similar messages in the text:

(from twitter person a) #followmarch @custwin – because they’re really great at analysing websites.

(from twitter person b) #followmarch @custwin – because they’re really great at analysing websites.

(from twitter person c) #followmarch @custwin – because they’re really great at analysing websites.

Perhaps we could take this further.  What about a #followtax for people who are identified as being great at tax advice, or #followrestaurants for restaurants that provide great food and service.  The possibilities are endless and, if Google saw there was some value in such endorsements, and had a way to weed out obvious spamming, just maybe such things could start to play a part in SEO in the future?

As always, bring on the dialogue.  Is the concept barmy, flawed, or is there something to look at in more depth?

I downloaded a game called Paper Glider from iTunes. It was the number one game in the ‘free’ (read: cheapskate) listings so I thought I’d give it a go.  The detail of the game isn’t important but what happens when a high score is gained is that there’s the opportunity to tweet.  To be honest, I thought I was tweeting my high score (it was late and I didn’t read it properly) but the tweet actually just came out like this:

It didn’t mention the high score at all.  But what followed over the next day was a series of tweets back from people who had read the tweet and downloaded the game for themselves.  A bit of banter followed about who had the highest score (me, of course – that’s the problem with being a perfectionist!), and I thought “hang on, there may be something in this”.

There’s been dialogue with a few people I know via Twitter.  Each of us have downloaded the game (and are playing) and so there’s a bit of common ground there.  When we meet in person that small ‘bond’ will still be there, as a non-business discussion point at least.  Whether or not that has any real value, I’d suggest that it does add a tiny bit of linkage between people.  Of course, people have been doing similar via the various games on Facebook for some time – building synergies with people they know, and I’m sure that has at least some value on a personal level, and because people buy people, perhaps there’s also a bit of transition to business as well.   Just perhaps, playing a few games can make business people appear a bit more warm/human, which can have positive knock-on effects.

In all this there were missed opportunities.  The iPhone app allows just one type of message to be broadcast (as per the screenshot above).  It would make a lot more sense if it had a choice of messages that could be broadcast via Twitter.  For example, I would never actually say “I’m completely addicted to the great iPhone game Paper Glider” and instead would more sedately say something like “I’ve been playing the iPhone game, Paper Glider – quite addictive”.   I also, when I do get a new high score, would like the option to tweet that out so that those who are interested pick up on it and things get more competitive.    Such functionality tweaks in the app also mean that the app provider gets more publicity (people trying to outdo each other).

The note of caution here though is in being careful of how you’re portrayed via Twitter.  If a series of high score updates came out from @custwin several times in a day then it’d send out a message that I have nothing better to do.  I certainly don’t have time to sit around playing iPhone games during the day so if choosing to tweet such things out, it’d be in the evening, which creates less ‘noise’ for people to read during the day.

Are there any views out there on whether games scores/updates (as apps, in Facebook etc.) either are, or aren’t useful in building relationships, even if in a very small way?

Each Friday they flood in – all the tweets inviting me to follow someone and quite often, there are several within one tweet.  And I think to myself:

“I follow you, and therefore I want to hear what you have to say on Twitter, but if you’re just going to give me a list of people to follow then it adds absolutely no value!”

In short, why am I going to spend the time to look at the profiles of people who are recommended, just to then possibly think “actually, there’s not much value in following them”?

However, if I saw a tweet similar to this then I’d be in a better position to decide:

#followfriday @kent-weather because they have great local updates on the snow situation

There’s no harm in doing more than one such tweet if there are more than one person worth following each week but perhaps there’s some merit in people stepping back and thinking “who really stood out for me this week and should be my #followfriday focus?”.  That person will feel more special than if amongst a list of several and the recipients of the tweet will consider it more closely.

Today, the snow has fully gripped Kent (and most of the UK) and a decision had to be made about whether to attempt a trip into the office or not.  I searched Google for ‘Kent weather’ and after the usual Met Office and BBC links there was a link to the website http://kent-weather.co.uk/.   I believe that the SEO achieved was probably mainly accidental (and could be easily further built on) but at the same time I don’t think commercial gain is the aim behind this site. 

In a nutshell, the site provides weather updates from someone (see http://www.kent-weather.co.uk/staticpages/index.php?page=about) who is passionate about meteorology and is sharing their insights with people in a way that explains more about the reasons behind weather currently in Kent.   It’s highly ‘regional’ and so is potentially of interest to many Kent people, whatever the weather – snow, storms, heatwaves … this site, and its owner are providing what could be a useful and interesting service to many people.

The Custwin approach to blogs is to provide information, which raises awareness of skills/expertise, and potentially business down the line (in a non-salesy way).  The Kent Weather site doesn’t seem to have any ‘down the line’ objective, and it’s clear there are many opportunities that could be capitalised on (if wished to).

There’s a phrase of “People buy people” but to extend that I’d say that “People buy people who have passion about their subject of expertise”.   I don’t know what Shaun (owner of that website) does for a day job, or whether he’s happy as things are, but I do get the feeling that there’s so much more that could be done with the website.  

For a start, he has huge potential to be the ‘go to’ source in any situation where Kent weather is a topic of interest.  Radio stations, local TV, newspapers and more …. all could have him as a ‘go to’ source.   So, there’s opportunity to become better known via the Kent media, which raises awareness of the brand that he doesn’t yet have.

I looked at the Twitter page, which has 249 followers.  If you took the whole population of Kent and boiled it down to a relatively small percentage who would be interested in seeing Kent Weather tweets, that’s still a huge number of followers that could be gained.  I’ve just made the number 250.   A recent estimate of the Kent population was 1.6 million people.  Just a half percentage of those would be about 8,000 people as followers on Twitter.

So what would be achieved by having more followers and getting publicity in the Kent media?   The answer is ‘awareness’.   Take the current snow in Kent – with thousands of followers on Twitter, an update on the website could be tweeted, which attracts people to the website to see the full details.   People could interact with the posting and whatever the weather, they’re likely to get a warm feeling about the person behind the website (because they’re providing something for nothing).  But none of that makes the website owner any money.  The website owner may not WANT to make money from the website, but with the right strategy, there are many opportunities.

For example, the website layout could be easily changed to allow for advertising, advertorial, and more – all from Kent companies or those targeting Kent.   If that advertising had a weather theme (e.g. a Custwin advert saying something like ‘Bring your website in from the cold’) then it may appeal more to the website visitors as it’d be more targeted (assuming the landing point from the advert also kept the theme up).    There is, of course, a fine balance between having a website that’s giving information (with passion) and one that becomes viewed as solely there to gain advertising revenue, but that balance can be achieved. 

The few thoughts here are just the tip of how a passion for a subject, with a geographical focus, could be monetised and there are numerous marketing people (online and offline) who would have views on the potential.   The point is though, that opportunities are there.  What would I do if I was the owner of the website?

1. Make a commitment to keeping the passion/quality of content up.

2. Find outside help (possibly a reciprocal deal, rather than paying for it) to look at the design and layout of the site, allowing for opportunities to place advertising and more on there.

3. Actively build up Twitter followers (there are so many ways to do this) to a very respectable number – 1,000 being an initial target, building to more and, in time, gaining a huge achievement like having 1% of the Kent population following.

4. Then capitalise on all the revenue and reputation generating opportunities, possibly turning it into a full-time business.

5. Think about how to expand further – find people in other parts of the country who have a similar passion and either link up with them or create an infrastructure that makes it easy for them to share their localised weather passion while monetising.

In my everyday work I see tons of websites that have been created purely to capitalise on advertising revenue and so it’s refreshing to see a website prominent in Google and providing a service to the Kent community.   If handled sensitively there’s much more that could be achieved without going over the top.     Look, for example, at Martin Lewis of http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/ - he didn’t suddenly get successful overnight (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Lewis_(financial_journalist)) but he had a passion for a subject and he progressed over time.  The subject of weather obviously isn’t as huge as consumer savings but it may still be something that could be monetised, as could many other subjects.

Update 21 December: a recent flurry of publicity, plus the snow, have increased the Twitter followers to 396 – this’ll be an interesting one to see how Shaun evolves what could be a business in its own right.