A cautionary tale of social media statistics

It’s important to understand the full context relating to social media statistics before you act on them.

The Stat

I came across this stat the other day:

91 per cent of mentions [on social media] come from people with fewer than 500 followers.

The implication in the source blog post and whitepaper was:

When it comes to your social media strategy, don’t discount the importance of brand mentions by Twitter users with low follower counts.

It’s complicated

Follower numbers shouldn’t be the be all and end all when it comes to defining your social media strategy. Agreed.

For a start, where influence is concerned, relevance, proximity, context and other factors are crucial. And followers is a very simplistic metric and depending on how they use social platforms, may have little in common with a person’s real potential for influence.

Also, even if the mention itself doesn’t influence anyone, simply the knowledge that an individual has shown an interest in your brand in some way is potentially of value.

But while sympathising with the inference drawn, I think the statistic and its underlying data would benefit from some numerical context to better understand their implications.

N.B. I’ve focussed on Twitter in this analysis as that’s where the majority of the data in the particular research apparently came from.

Analysis

Given the stat focuses on accounts with less than 500 followers, let’s split Twitter into two groups:

– Low Follower Group – Less than 500 followers.
– High Follower Group – 500 or more followers.

And then let’s look at two relevant areas – Impressions and Retweets.

Impressions

Who could have seen brand mentions by each of these groups and potentially been influenced by them?

To calculate this we need to know the following for each group:

– Average number of followers.
– Impression rate.

Average followers

I used this estimated distribution of follower numbers across Twitter users*, combined with Lissted‘s data on nearly 2 million of the most influential accounts, to calculate a weighted average of the number of followers each group is likely to have.

Results:

– Low Follower Group – 100
– High Follower Group – 8,400

Impression rate

Every time you tweet only a proportion of your followers will actually see it. For many users this proportion could be less than ten per cent. The “impression rate” represents the total number of impressions generated by your tweet, divided by your follower number.

It only includes impressions on specific Twitter platforms – web, iOS app and Android app. This means impressions in applications like Hootsuite and Tweetdeck don’t count.

The rate is also complicated by retweets. The rate calculated by Twitter Analytics includes impressions that were actually seen by followers of the retweeting account, who may not follow you.

I’ve tried to look at retweets separately below, so for the purpose of this analysis I’m looking for impression rates without the benefit of retweet amplification.

On this basis I’ve assumed an impression rate of ten per cent for the Low Follower Group and five per cent for the High Follower Group. These assumptions are based on various articles estimating impression rates in the range of 2-10%. For the sake of prudence I’ve used a lower rate for High Follower accounts on the assumption that they could have a higher proportion of inactive and spam followers.

We can now calculate the proportion of total impressions related to each group as shown in this table:

Finding: only 19 per cent of impressions relate to the Low Follower Group.

Quite simply the difference in reach of the High Follower accounts (84x higher – 8,400 v 100) more than offsets the difference in volume of mentions by the Low Follower Group (only 10x higher – 910 v 90).

For the Low Follower Group to even represent 50 per cent of the total impressions we’d need to assume an impressions rate for this group that is over 8x higher than for the High Follower Group e.g. 42% v 5%.

Though I suspect there may be a difference, is it really likely to be that much?

Retweets

Next we need to consider if any of the brand mentions were retweets. If so were the original tweets more likely to be by accounts with high or low followers?

A lot of retweets by volume are by accounts with low followers. That’s just common sense because the vast majority of Twitter users have low follower numbers. But when we’re exposed to a retweet it’s the original tweet that we’re exposed to. This is the very reason why Twitter includes the resulting impressions in the Impression rate (I’m assuming automatic retweets, not manual ones).

To understand this better I analysed a sample of over six million tweets tracked by Lissted over the last two months that were retweeted at least once. The sample included tweets by 1.27 million different accounts and collectively these tweets received over 200 million retweets in total.

Of these six million tweets, 0.6% of them (c.39,000) accounted for two thirds of the total retweets generated.

And 99 per cent of these “top tweets” were by users with 500+ followers.

Finding: a high proportion of retweets are of users with High Followers, even if many are by users with Low Followers.

Conclusion

Mentions relating to accounts with higher than 500 followers appear more likely to:

– represent the majority of initial impressions; and
– generate the majority of any resulting retweets.

In other words it’s high follower accounts that are more likely to be the source of the majority of the brand mentions that people are exposed to on Twitter.

Caveat

As I said at the start the purpose of this analysis is simply to give some proper context to an isolated statistic. Assessing the impact and actions you should take due to mentions of your brand requires consideration of a lot more factors than simply numerical exposure.

It could be the case that high follower tweets make up the vast majority of the mentions people are exposed to, but factors like trust, context, proximity and relevance could lead to mentions by low followers having more influence on business outcomes.

The key is to properly understand who is talking about you and why, and not base decisions on sweeping statistics.

*N.B the follower distribution analysis is from Dec 2013, but as Twitter hasn’t grown a huge amount in the last year, it seems reasonable to assume its validity. Happy to share my detailed workings with anyone who’s interested.

Coca Cola isn’t the “Real Thing” on Twitter

When it comes to engaging on Twitter, Coca Cola has a huge organic opportunity that they seem to be ignoring. So instead of resorting to automated campaigns that result in embarrassment, they should get back to basics.

Last week wasn’t great for Coca Cola. On Wednesday the brand pulled its automated #MakeItHappy social campaign. The campaign auto tweeted ASCII images based on negative tweets. In response, Gawker created a bot that submitted passages from Mein Kampf. Sure enough, the campaign tweeted them.

And that got me wondering….just how well is Coca Cola utilising Twitter?

The findings aren’t great.

Accounts

The @CocaCola account is far and away the most important to the brand.

@CocaCola has 2.85 million followers, follows 67,815 and has tweeted 125,000 times. According to Status People 57 per cent of these followers are “Good”. That’s a potential audience of 1.6 million.

It has six times more followers than the next most popular Coca Cola account.

The rest of the analysis therefore focuses on this account.

Top 10 Coca Cola brand accounts by followers excluding @Coca Cola

Screen Name	Followers
CocaColaMx	458,254
CocaColaCo	321,159
DietCoke	300,586
CokeZero	226,594
Sprite	221,604
CocaColafr	167,734
vitaminwater	127,701
docpemberton	125,069
WorldofCocaCola	116,334
CocaColaRacing	108,676

Tweet activity

CocaCola will have appeared to be silent to its followers for most of the last six months.

Almost all the activity on the @CocaCola account in the last six months has been @replies. This includes those #MakeItHappy tweets.

@replies are only seen by people who follow both accounts involved in the conversation. This means a tiny fraction of @CocaCola’s followers will have seen these tweets.

Apart from replies, they have only tweeted four times and retweeted three times. The last occasion was in November last year.

Who they follow

Coca Cola are ignoring high profile “fan” accounts that have massive organic reach potential, both within and outside of Twitter.

@CocaCola follows 67,815 accounts. A lot less than their follower count, but still a big number.

But it’s not the number they follow that’s the most surprising thing, it’s the apparent lack of logic or strategy.

For instance they do follow this account:

And yet all of these accounts follow @CocaCola, but they don’t follow them back:

Many of these accounts even have strong links to the brand. Will I Am, Agnez Mo, FIFA, Adventure Girl and the Olympics.

The 8 accounts pictured have a gross follower count of over 38 million. I also spotted other similar high profile “fan accounts”, the top 25 of which totaled 70 million followers. That’s a huge potential audience to tap into, even allowing for duplication or fakes.

Plus, high profile people and organisations like these have a reach that goes way beyond Twitter.

Report Card

Grade D – Huge missed opportunity

Coca Cola has a significant organic reach of its own on Twitter.

It replies to individual fans, but it isn’t saying anything to the wider community.

It follows accounts that don’t even tweet.

Meanwhile it has high profile followers with even greater reach than their own that it doesn’t follow back.

Instead of investing in an automated campaign, a better strategy would be to get back to basics.

To carry out the analysis I used Lissted’s database of 1.8 million of the most influential accounts on Twitter.

50 plus 50 equals 100 most influential UK journalists on Twitter?

The Press Gazette has announced its Top 50 most influential UK journalists on Twitter and I suspect most people won’t be surprised by many of the names. Like any such list though, there will always be people we might have expected to see who aren’t included.

With this in mind I put together this list of 50 (using Lissted), one or more of which on another day, on another basis, might well have made the cut.

Of course there will be other contenders too, so please feel free to suggest them in the comments.

I’ve created a Twitter list of these 50 plus the Press Gazette 50 here.

@andrewrawnsley

@andrewsparrow

@bbcnormanS (Norman Smith)

@BenedictBrogan

@BowenBBC (Jeremy Bowen)

@CathyNewman

@Dannythefink (Daniel Finkelstein)

@dansabbagh

@deborahjaneorr

@dpjhodges (Dan Hodges)

@edyong209

@faisalislam

@Freedland (Jonathan Freedland)

@gabyhinsliff

@gallaghereditor (Tony Gallagher)

@georgemonbiot

@greensladeR (Roy Greenslade)

@maitlis (Emily Maitlis)

@PennyRed (Laurie Penny)

@SamCoatesTimes

@ShippersUnbound (Tim Shipman)

@toadmeister (Toby Young)

@tombradby

@VictoriaCoren

@zoesqwilliams

Are brands going to need Twitter Search SEO now?

Twitter announced yesterday that it’s going to start including selected tweets over a week old in search results. The following is from their post:

“As we roll this out over the coming days, the Tweets that youâ€™ll see in search results represent a fairly small percentage of total Tweets ever sent. We look at a variety of types of engagement, like favorites, retweets and clicks, to determine which Tweets to show. We’ll be steadily increasing this percentage over time, and ultimately, aim to surface the best content for your query. For now, enjoy your trip down memory lane!”

If I understand this right it means that when someone searches for a term in Twitter the “Top” results will include tweets that could go back months, even years.

Now I may be jumping the gun here, but doesn’t this have potentially significant implications for reputation management?

When Google was indexing tweets a couple of years ago there was discussion about the SEO implications of real time results from Twitter, that ended when Google stopped indexing the Twitter firehose in the summer of 2011. But that was never about old tweets appearing, just current ones.

At the moment if you’re a brand and someone tweets something negative about you then your worst case in Twitter search terms is it appears in the results for a few days. It’s the impact of the conversation itself that you have to deal with, both online and off, and any resulting posts and articles that might rank highly in Google searches in the future.

But with this change to the Twitter search approach, a brand could find that the top search result is a particularly negative tweet that received a significant response at the time. This tweet may or may not have been part of a wider conversation that appeared elsewhere in the online and offline worlds, but one things for sure, replaying it back months later to new people again and again isn’t something you are going to want.

But then how do you respond to this? With SEO if you have a negative blog post or article ranking highly you might seek to produce content and engage in PR that results in other pages pushing this awkward one down the SERPs hierarchy.

How do you achieve this with a highly ranked tweet? Twitter’s post indicates the factors that they are taking account of in ranking older tweets – RTs, favorites and clicks etc. Does that mean a brand will need to try and generate competing tweets that rank higher by these measures? If so here are a few questions:

Will Twitter rank tweets by a brand about that brand highly, or will it filter these out automatically, wishing to show the wider community’s view?

Where will promoted tweets appear in search results? Can I buy my way above the offending tweet ala Google Adwords?

Will this mean that a paid tweet by a celebrity that potentially receives significant levels of RTs and @mentions starts to accrue more value than the generally “here today gone tomorrow” nature of one now?

This is all top of the head stuff, and we obviously need to see what these new results look like, what happens to the levels of Twitter search activity and how users respond.

But could this be the start of Twitter Search SEO?

How much of Twitter do the founders still own?

I had some discussion this morning on Twitter about what level of ownership the founders are likely to still have after the company’s latest round of VC funding. I thought I would do a bit of digging and see if I could estimate it.

Note: If anyone is aware of any funding rounds not included below, have specific information on any of the assumptions made or can spot flaws in my calculations please feel free to highlight them in the comments.

First round – July 2007

This is the trickiest element as I don’t think terms of this deal were ever disclosed. Techcrunch reported at the time an estimate of $1-$5m of funding raised. It was later reported that the deal size was net funding after costs of $4.8m. The unknown factor though is what level of equity Union Square Ventures (the first VC) received in return for this investment.

In the absence of any firm figure for this dilution we need to make an estimate. This was obviously a pretty early stage investment at a relatively significant ($5m) level so one could expect the dilution to be fairly significant. We also know from the Second Round (see below) that almost a year later Twitter was valued pre investment at $80m. So balancing these factors lets assume a pre investment valuation for the first round of $20m which would mean that ownership post First Round would have been:

Founders – 80 per cent
VC – 20 per cent

This estimate is highly material to the rest of the calculations as it sets the initial level of founder ownership that all other rounds will then dilute. In the conclusion below I indicate the impact of different assumptions for this round to the current level of ownership.

Second Round – May 2008

Investment size was reported this time at $15m with a pre investment valuation of $80m. Post investment this gives revised ownership of:

Founders – 67.4 per cent
First Round VC – 16.8 per cent
Second Round VC – 15.8 per cent

Third Round – February 2009

Investment reported at $35m with a valuation of $250m though it is not clear if this is pre or post investment. If we assume pre this gives the following ownership post investment:

Founders – 59.1 per cent
First Round VC – 14.8 per cent
Second Round VCs – 13.9 per cent
Third Round VCs – 12.3 per cent

Fourth Round – September 2009

Investment size reported at $100m with a valuation of $1bn. Again not stated whether pre or post so lets assume pre gives the following ownership post investment:

Founders – 53.7 per cent
First Round VC – 13.4 per cent
Second Round VCs – 12.6 per cent
Third Round VCs – 11.2 per cent
Fourth Round VCs – 9.1 per cent

Fifth and latest round – December 2010

Investment reported at $200m at a valuation of $3.7bn. Again not stated whether pre or post so lets assume pre gives the following current ownership estimate:

Founders – 51.0 per cent
First Round VC – 12.7 per cent
Second Round VCs – 11.9 per cent
Third Round VCs – 10.6 per cent
Fourth Round VCs – 8.6 per cent
Fifth Round VCs – 5.1 per cent

Conclusion

This analysis would estimate the Twitter Founders ownership at 51 per cent with a valuation approaching $2bn.

If you vary the First round dilution assumption you get the following alternative estimates for the current level:

Initial dilution	Founder ownership	Valuation
10%	57.3%	$2.25bn
15%	54.1%	$2.10bn
25%	47.8%	$1.85bn
33%	42.5%	$1.65bn
40%	38.2%	$1.50bn
50%	31.9%	$1.25bn

NB It is also worth noting that if the valuations for rounds 3, 4 and 5 were all post investment valuations this would lead to an additional dilution in all the ownership percentage figures of approximately 3.25 per cent i.e. 51 per cent would fall to 49 per cent. The valuation figures would also all fall by approximately 8 per cent as the post investment current valuation would be $3.7bn not $3.9bn ($3.7bn valuation + $200m investment).

Show me numbers

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