About a year ago, many brands at Reed Business Information drank the Twitter Kool-Aid. I recently analyzed how things were going, and learned quite a bit about the benefits and challenges of Twitter within business media. Today, I want to share some metrics of our use of Twitter and explore what it means for B2B media brands.
I looked at the use of Twitter across 35 RBI brands and close to 60 employees. Here is some data:
- 35 brands
- 64,294 followers
- Following 7,811 people
- Listed 3,397 times
- 17,437 updates
- 57 employees
- 23,436 followers
- Following 15,383 people
- Listed 1,066 times
- 45,407 updates
Now, we have to be careful not to read too much into metrics such as ”number of followers,” as they are imperfect measures at best. But here are a few takeaways that popped into my head:
Trust. Brands at RBI have been around for decades, some for well over 100 years, meaning that trust has built over generations. For much of that time, these business brands were known only within their niches, serving a finite community of experts. But now, the Web has flattened the world in this regard, with more ”prosumers” (non-core B2B readers) reading an article from a brand like Interior Design or Packaging Digest in a single day in 2010 than they would have in an entire year in 1990.
When I look at the number of followers for a business media brand, I consider the brand equity that has been created over the years. When an engineer sees the Design News logo, he likely doesn’t have to spend much time considering if this is a trustworthy source of news and information. Despite having measured nearly half the number of RBI brands on Twitter as employees who have their own accounts, the brands have well more than double the amount of followers.
Connection. Twitter is inherently about connection, and it was not surprising to find that RBI’s employees follow more people on Twitter than our brand accounts do (especially when taking into account the difference in sample size).
One thing to note here is that I often find that individuals who update the brand Twitter account also have personal Twitter accounts. For example, School Library Journal’s Kathy Ishizuka updates the SLJ account, as well as her own. So editors need to carefully select which updates go to which account and develop the personality of each feed as distinct entities.
In general, I often find that brand accounts feel more sterile, while individual accounts are better at sharing the personality of the author. In the Twitter world, personality equals greater engagement and interaction.
Credibility. Twitter Lists are really cool, but my impression is that adoption is slow for this feature, which lets users segment followers or tweet content into their own stream, making it easier to track subgroups. Much like my thoughts on ”trust”’ above, brand reputation and awareness likely drive the amount of times RBI’s brands are “listed” on Twitter. If someone is creating a list about product design, it is not hard to believe that they would add Packaging Digest to their list. It will be interesting to see how the use of Twitter Lists evolves over time.
Marketing. I found it fascinating that individuals had nearly three times as many updates as the brands did. For many brands of any type on Twitter, their feeds can be used as a broadcast tool, much like an RSS feed. Despite this, RBI employees had shared many more updates. I think this speaks to how much Twitter has become a communications platform, with @replies and updates adding up quickly.
Will all of these updates have any SEO value in the future? Much like a 40–year-old magazine brand putting its full archives online in 1999, I hope these tweets will one day form the basis of deep search capabilities and analysis. Every so often I will pull out an archived issue of Library Journal or Variety magazine from 50 years ago – imagine if we could read tweets from 1952.
These numbers are important, but they do little to illustrate the nuance of how a business media brand is using Twitter. Check out some of RBI’s top brands and employees on Twitter:
- Interior Design
- Library Journal
- Packaging Digest
- Home Accent Today’s Wes Kennedy
- School Library Journal’s Kathy Ishizuka
- Publishers Weekly’s Calvin Reid
When examining your own brands’ presence on Twitter, you’ll want to look beyond the number of followers and posts and analyze the types of updates they are sharing, the number of @replies they post, and the overall tone. Do you get a sense that a human being is behind the Tweets? That is a critical factor in using social media successfully.
Want to know more about how to leverage Twitter, check out “The Pros and Cons of Twitter.” Have questions about Twitter in business media? Drop me an email at dan@danblank.com. You can also follow me on Twitter.
Dan Blank is Director of Content Strategy & Development at Reed Business Information.
