Anyone who knows me will know I’m partial to (more than) the odd beer at my local pub. But when it closed indefinitely last month, us villagers were quick to up sticks and walk the 20 yards across the road to join the Royal British Legion.

I’ve paid my subs for the year, the membership card sits nicely in my purse and I’ll admit I’ve become a real fan. The beer is flowing (at a much reduced rate), you always get a warm welcome from old Fred behind the bar and they’ve even got a new bowl for the dog so he can join in the proceedings.

It’s a charity I’m very pleased to be supporting, so I was keen to move my new found allegiance online and look for the British Legion on Twitter.

But oh dear.

I checked out @RBLPOPPY and @POPPYSUPPORT . But where was my warm welcome? The cheery banter? The sense of community?

@RBLPOPPY just shows me a list of URLs about how to become a member of the forces, with no updates since the beginning of this year. I don’t want to sign-up to the army, but I do want to know how my support is helping veterans and wouldn’t mind the odd bit of interaction (akin to my little chats with Fred) via Twitter.  No @ replies either (unless you count the one to Cheryl Cole applauding her on a great X Factor show). Crikey.

@POPPYSUPPORT seems better. A greater variety of news and information provided by the team, but I did get the sense I was being bombarded with links rather than getting drawn into a conversation, and it all appears to be focused around the Autumn to link in with Remembrance Day. Surely it would be better to keep me engaged all year round and use loyal followers to draw in even more fans by the time the poppies go on sale next year?

But now I’m starting to feel a bit mean. I really do like the British Legion and what it stands for.

I guess my disappointment stems from knowing that they do offline communities so very well and wishing they would transfer that sentiment to their online presence, and potentially bring a whole new generation of British Legion fans with them.

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By now, everyone knows that Twitter is about more than just follower count.  Yes, it’s still one of the first impressions you get when you load a profile and this won’t change soon but ultimately, when it comes to followers, it’s more about quality than quantity.

Simply put, without an interested and involved audience, its difficult to generate the interactions and relationships that prove the platform’s value.

With this in mind, it recently occurred to me that maybe there’s a different way to think of follower count.  What if we considered it the same way that businesses track revenue versus profit?

Revenues

In such a scenario, total number of followers becomes your total revenue.  That is to say, it should give some idea of the volume or scale of the operation you’re dealing with.

Whether because of high quality content, a regular thirty tweets a day or simply splashing out on a nefarious auto-follow service, the person running the account has clearly invested time in their Twitter profile.

Before we get into the details, it’s worth emphasizing that revenues are important.

It’s very rare that an account with only fifty followers is in its optimum position of influence.  Generally, this is instead a sign that either the content isn’t adding enough value or the user is missing opportunities to interact within wider discussions to extend their reach.

The economies of scale that come with a large group of followers are one of the key factors to maximize the return on your invested time with Twitter.  After all, you’re still inputting the same 140 characters but getting a bigger bang for your buck.

However, this is where the idea of profit comes in.

Profits

If you’ve a thousand followers but they’re largely spammers and charlatans tweeting about “red hot iPad deals” and SEO marketing, the value is going to be minimal.  If instead, they’re an interactive and relevant cross-section of stakeholders in your market, interests or products, it’s a different case altogether.

While Twitter makes it hard to work this “profitability” out for others’ follower counts, it’s a valuable distinction to bear in mind when cultivating your own community of interested users.  By all means, accept the more spurious followers into your community but be realistic about whether there are 500 people genuinely fascinated by the string of press releases that you’re putting out there.

This shift in perspective helps you assess which tweets and techniques are bringing in the right crowd.  It can be hard work finding and defining the character of your account; especially for B2B brands but this feedback is a good indicator of your success.

Ultimately, you need followers who will gain something from the relationship with your account and (if you’ll forgive the tautology) the best way to do so is make sure you’re giving them some value.  The patterns of profit as we have defined it should match up quite neatly with the degree to which you’re enhancing their social media experience.

In conclusion, it’s worth bearing in mind that if you’re looking at a situation of high revenue but low profits, it might be time to consider reworking your Twitter ‘business plan’ … or face inevitable bankruptcy.

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In a post on the company’s official blog, Twitter has announced that it is rolling out a new link shortener for Twitter.com and native Twitter apps. In addition, it has announced big changes to the way these links will be treated and displayed.

T.co

The first move the company is making is to replace the standard Twitter shortening service twt.tl with t.co. The roll-out will be gradual and will happen across the next few months.

Partially displaying actual URLs

The second development is more radical, as the post explains:

“A really long link such as http://www.amazon.com/Delivering-Happiness-Profits-Passion-Purpose/dp/0446563048 might be wrapped as http://t.co/DRo0trj for display on SMS, but it could be displayed to web or application users as amazon.com/Delivering- or as the whole URL or page title. Ultimately, we want to display links in a way that removes the obscurity of shortened link and lets you know where a link will take you.”

As alluded here, the move is surely an attempt to protect users and ensure they know exactly where a link will take them. However, according to the post, the new links will also be used with Twitter’s Promoted Tweets advertising service to provide metrics to advertisers.

This is a big move by Twitter, even if the company has admitted it is still uncertain of how some of the finer details of how the service will work will pan out (it is currently being tested by staff – check out @rsarver and @raffi - so expect more changes after this ‘beta’ trial). It will also be interesting to see the response from services like bit.ly…

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Reports this morning have revealed that Twitter is set to roll out its long anticipated advertising model this evening (UK time). This follows a series of moves over the last week which suggests that Twitter is starting to make some major moves to upgrade the service.

The new ad service – called Promoted Tweets – will allows advertisers to place their ads next to certain Twitter searches that they have purchased keywords for. In the future, Twitter plans to insert sponsored messages into users’ streams in what will be seen as a much more controversial move:

“When a Twitter user searches for a word an advertiser bought, the promoted message will show up at the top of the results, even if it was written much earlier. The posts say they are promoted by the company in small type, and when someone rolls over a promoted post with a cursor, it turns yellow.”

It will be interesting to see how well this integrates with the service moving forward. Initial reactions on Twitter suggest that any form of advertising is going to be met with suspicion, but if this is integrated well, there is every likelihood that it could start a long but necessary journey for Twitter in finding profitability.

And for brands, the challenge (or opportunity) is how best to use these ads to help with reputation or brand promotion. Will users get immune to the ads at the top of their feeds?

The new Twitter branded services for Blackberry and iPhone (via Tweetie) announced in the last few days, combined with the eagerly anticipated new Twitter.com layout suggests that Twitter’s main goal is to keep users on its properties near its ads. Will it work? Time will tell…

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A brand new Twitter client launched today, claiming to bring Twitter to the masses. Seesmic Look comes from the French company Seesmic who already have a number of desktop and web clients to their name.

Seesmic Look is a Windows desktop client (Microsoft are partners in the venture, in the same week that a certain Mr Gates joined Twitter no less!) that is essentially a slimmed down version of a Twitter client. It looks great: really slick and very 2.0 but without any of the scary features and long, tedious setup you might find on the more serious Twitter clients.

Seesmic has also signed up a number of other partners all of whom can feature their Twitter account as a ‘channel’ on the application – these include a number of media companies – including the Huffington Post, Kodak, Red Bull, CNN Money, SOTS, and Time.

Having had a quick play with it, the software is certainly very impressive. It is easy to do a number of different tasks, but the functionality isn’t what you would expect from a traditional Twitter client so does take a bit of getting used to. However, for Twitter newbies, this won’t matter of course.

Getting the application to the masses will be more of a challenge for Seesmic, but as long as they can overcome this not insurmountable, but cumbersome obstacle – I’m sure Microsoft will help – there is no reason why Seesmic Look won’t do the business.

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Following various reports over the last few weeks about the state of Twitter’s popularity, today Hubspot has released its third ‘State of the Twittersphere‘ report.

The report is based on the 5 million Twitter accounts and 6 million tweets that Hubspot collects through its Twitter Grader tool and therefore is based on some fairly solid data. It also compares performance to its two previous reports released earlier in 2009.

So what does it tell us?

• Growth has fallen from a high of 13% in March of 2009 to 3.5% in October 2009, the most recent month for which we have data – note this is still growth, just not as fast as at the site’s peak in 2009
• In the last seven months, the average Twitter account holder has become “less of a newbie”. Why is this? The report suggests: “The change may be a reflection of the slowing growth rate. Because of the slowing growth, today’s population of Twitter users has been using the tool longer than the population several months ago.”
  • Today the average Twitter account has 300 followers; in July 2009, it had 70
  • The average account now follows 173 accounts; in July 2009 it was only following 4
  • The average account today has posted 420 updates; in July 2009 that number was 119
• There is better adherence to ‘best practices’
  • 53% of users had their bio completed (compared to 24% in July 2009)
  • 65% had their location (compared to 31%)
  • 41% had their web address added (compared to 20%)
• As with the previous Sysomos research, Twitter’s international reach is increasing; 15% of the top 20 Twitter locations in July 2009 were outside North America, now that figure stands at 40%
• In terms of user characteristics, there were some other really interesting stats:
  • 82% of Twitter users have less than 100 followers
  • 81% of Twitter users are following less than 100 people
  • Thursday and Friday are the most active days on Twitter, each accounting for 16% of total tweets
  • 10-11 pm is the most active hour on Twitter, accounting for 4.8% of the tweets in an average day – I’m assuming this is across time zones as it is not referenced specifically in the report

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There has been a lot of noise in the last few weeks about how Twitter’s growth, particularly in the US, has levelled off.

But new research from Sysomos reveals that in the rest of the world at least, the micro-blogging service is as popular as ever.

The study, conducted during October and December 2009 found that the number of US unique users was 50.8%, a sharp drop from 62.1% in June 2009 – suggesting that there has been significant growth elsewhere in the globe:

“For location, the most significant difference in users was a surge in Brazil, which accounted for 8.8% of unique users, an increase of more than four-fold from 2% in June. Twitter users in Indonesia accounted for 2.4% of the population, compared with less than 0.5%, while Twitter users in Germany rose to 2.5% from 1.5%.”

When cities were examined, London still leads the way with the biggest population in terms of unique users (2.08%), while Los Angeles has 1.63%, Sao Paulo (1.47%), New York (1.44%) and Chicago (1.2%). Despite London’s lead in terms of users, the UK capital is pipped by New Yorkers when it comes to the number of tweets generated – make what you will of that one!

These are interesting statistics, but what can we learn? It seems that the rest of the world is really getting the micro-blogging bug and usage is certainly increasing outside the US. Detractors point to the fact that usage in the US is actually slowing quickly, but as all good PRs know, it’s not necessarily about the numbers, but the power of the influencers in the audience that really matters.

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Julian March, executive producer at Sky News Online, has revealed to Journalism.co.uk that Tweetdeck (the leading Twitter desktop client) will be installed “on all staff machines within a month”.

Sky has been slowly increasing its use of Twitter having appointed a ‘Twitter correspondent’ last year and rolling out the @skynewsbreak account.

March states:

“The big change for us in 2010 is evolving how social media plays a role in our journalism. We no longer ghettoise it to one person, but are in the process of embedding throughout the whole team…”

At Wildfire, we’ve seen a huge increase in the number of journalists using Twitter over the last year or so. There are a number of reasons for this. We’ve seen journalists using Twitter to publicise their recent articles, communicate directly with their readers and also, increasingly, to source stories or find spokespeople.

For a PR, this is a really exciting development. I now talk to journalists on Twitter every single day. Not just about work-related issues, but anything that comes up – from cricket to snow. This enables us all to build closer relationships with the journalists we work with.

In the tech sector, where technologies like this are adopted quickly by journalists, this has been a common exercise for a while now.

The move by Sky suggests that more and more journalists will soon be on Twitter, which can only be a good thing for all of us in the PR industry.

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Retweeting – the process by which you repeat (or retweet) a tweet written by someone else – is standard currency on Twitter. By retweeting someone else, you are assigning value to what they’ve said or shared. And by being retweeted, you are expanding the awareness of your brand and your reputation on Twitter and beyond.

It’s the way that messages spread, virally, around the Twittersphere and, for that reason, is the holy grail for brands.

Controversially, Twitter has recently revamped the way that retweets work, but despite this, the power of the RT still remains. So what makes a perfect retweetable tweet? Here are my top five tips:

1. Brevity – When you retweet and credit the original author, additional content can be added to the tweet. If the original message is 130 characters, there won’t be much space left, meaning you will have to edit the original message to get the character count down.

Try to keep your tweet short and snappy to make retweeting easier

2. Content – Be a bit of a tease by giving enough content to hook readers, but leave them wanting more. Controversial statements and questions all work well in enticing your followers to RT.

Content is king and brevity is important, so use your words wisely

3. Links – The link is usually the call to action of any tweet. Often, you will link to a page that provides more information about the tweet, for example a blog post or website page. Studies have shown tweets that contain a link are more likely to be retweeted, but use a URL shortener to make sure you don’t use up too many characters – bit.ly is the most common and most ‘trusted’.

Include a link and make sure it’s bit.ly

4. Timing – It goes without saying that if there are more people using Twitter when you send out your message, then there is a greater chance that someone will see and then retweet the message.

Tweet between 3pm and 4pm on a Thursday or a Friday as this is when Twitter is busiest

5. Relevance – There are two key points here. Firstly, know your audience: make sure your content is perfectly tuned to your particular set of followers as these are the people that will get the ball (or tweet) rolling. Secondly, be topical: if possible, try and tweet on issues that are in the news or ideally, that are just breaking.

Engage your followers by being relevant and topical

Following these five steps should help you maximise your retweet potential, but remember, this is not an exact science; sometimes it is the tweet you least expect that will be successful.

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It’s been quite a year for Twitter. Despite not yet making much money [the pic is a bit misleading, I know], popularity in the micro-blogging platform has soared in 2009. Outside the US, global figures in September reached 58.4 million – a 949% increase on this time last year.

With search engines falling over themselves to get tweets showing up in results and with other social networks clamouring to get Twitter integrated, the future certainly seems bright.

So why the success? What puts Twitter above the other micro-blogger pretenders-to-the-throne and why is it seen as posing such a threat to more established players?

Back to basics

Following feature-rich networks like Facebook, Myspace and Bebo, Twitter is bold in its simplicity. The focus is very much on user generated content, with supporting material such as background images or profile text kept low-key. It’ll be interesting to see whether Twitter is brave enough to stick to the ‘simpler is better’ format, or whether recent tweaks (like Twitter Lists and the new retweet functionality) are precursors for future functionality additions.

The micro-blogging craze

Blogging has been popular for some time now, but it has a few downsides, primarily that it is time-consuming and labour-intensive. Micro-blogging solves these issues. It is easy to use and the 140 character limit makes writing even the most complex tweets a painless, quick and easy experience. Time-pressed, would-be bloggers have been flocking to Twitter to realise their aim of broadcasting to the world.

Opt-in

So many communication methods fall down because of one thing: spam. Twitter effortlessly gets around this problem by requiring users to opt-in to messages they want to receive. If a user is being too noisy, commercial or irrelevant, the solution is easy: simply unfollow.

The API

Coming back to the first point, Twitter’s simplicity means that it is very straightforward to take its core data and create other ways of presenting or interacting with it. Because of this and through its open API, all manner of desktop clients, analytics tools and gimmicks have sprung up around the service. This has fuelled the interest in the service, driven by an active and dedicated developer community.

All brands are welcome

From the beginning, Facebook has always been about ‘real’ people. Twitter is about real people too, but it’s also open to anyone or anything, from people, brands and characters to animals, ideas and bridges. This open-door policy has seen businesses flocking to the network to begin communicating more directly with their public. Facebook, possibly seeing the error of its ways, has been quick to  embrace business interaction further, but Twitter is unique in putting all users on an equal footing.

Media lovefest

If we look at the reason for Twitter’s growth in the UK in 2009, the media have played a huge role with daily mentions of the network almost guaranteed in at least one national newspaper. From Stephen Fry threatening to quit, to David Cameron’s glib remarks, Twitter has been at the centre of our news agenda.

So why the interest? Well, the openness of the service means that Twitter provides a constant stream of fodder for our celebrity-obsessed hacks. On top of this, Twitter is a great way for journalists to communicate with readers, source stories and build up their own fan bases.

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