Last year MIT produced some research on how to secure more retweets.  Georgia Institute of Technology have followed this up with 7 habits that the best Twitter users apparently have (as measured by increases in follower count).

This comes after research that saw them study 507 Twitter users over a 15 month period that saw them generate over 500,000 tweets.  It’s quite possibly the first study that has look explicitely at what causes a Twitter account to grow its followers.
7 habits of effective Twitter users

1. Don’t be negative – People are generally attracted to people that post positive tweets.  Negative or sarcastic tweets tend to put people off.  The study found that consistently negative tweets was a key predictor of low follower growth.  Try and post at least 2 positive tweets to each negative one.
2. Inform people, don’t self-promote – This is particularly important.  Previous research has suggested that just 20% of Twitter users are informers, with the remainder posting mainly about themselves.  Being informative was one of the strongest predictors of gaining new followers in this study: this included passing on links and retweeting. In fact being an informer rather than a meformer was associated with 30 times more growth in followers!
3. Encourage retweets – Those MIT tips I mentioned earlier fit in here.  The research showed that generating social proof is really important when growing your following.  Generating more retweets = more followers.  Kinda obvious, but one to keep remembering.
4. Focus on a topic – It’s easy with Twitter to take a scattergun approach and tweet about all sorts.  The research is clear that having a clear focus helps you to grow your followers faster.  Why? Well, it may be a signal-to-noise-type thing. If you stay on-topic, your interests are clearer and it’s easier to make the choice to follow you.
5. Write good quality content – This doesn’t just mean the subject of your tweet, but also the way you construct it.  So no going overboard with hashtagging every word!  The study showed that complex words can work, if they fit the context of your audience.
6. Be energetic – This is an interesting one.  It’s tended to be said that posting a lot of tweets in a relatively short timeframe is bad form, but the research found that this kind of behaviour correlated with a growth in followers.
7. Mix up broadcasts with direct tweets – This is another interesting one.  For the most followed accounts, content was split quite evenly between tweets sent to everyone, and tweets sent to specific people.  The ratio was 45% broadcast/55% targeted.  So the general rule is to talk to individual people more often than to everyone.

Now of course, some of these tips may (hopefully) be common sense to many of you, but they do provide some nice guidance on how to be a good Twitter citizen.

Do you have any tips that have worked for you?

Predicting the best time to do things online is an ongoing challenge, whether it’s the best time to write a tweet or put out an advert.  A new model believes it has many of the answers when it comes to the best time to advertise on a variety of platforms.

The model was created as part of research from the University of Michigan and it predicts when people use various media each day, and even when they’re using multiple media at the same time.

This is nothing new, but whereas previous models have laboured to achieve accuracy figures of 60-70%, this new model claims to be accurate 97% of the time.

“For businesses, our model does a much better job of predicting where your customers are at any given time,” says lead researcher Chen Lin, assistant professor of marketing at Michigan State University. “It represents a significant advancement over other models because much of that work assumed people consumed one type of media at a time.”

The researchers studied the media consumption habits of 2,000 American residents, and used this data to create their forecasting model.

The research revealed that 35% of our time is spent consuming one form of media or another, with television still the most popular, followed closely by the computer.

This changes at the weekend however, with more time spent watching television and reading print publications, with a subsequent drop in computer usage.

People spend about 1.5 hours a day consuming multiple media at the same time (e.g., surfing the web while watching television). This happens more at during the start of the workday and before bed—at about 9 a.m. and again at 9 p.m.

Mixing up your media

The researchers found that mixing media can often have a good result.  For instance, print media remained popular early in the morning, and was also particularly popular when paired with other forms of media.

“The old thinking is that print is endangered, but we found that it doesn’t need to be eliminated,” Lin says. “Print can have a second life if it’s cleverly paired with new media such as personal computers and smart phones.”

Lin goes as far as to say that different media are in fact complimentary, and as such should not be regarded as competing for our attention.

For example, print ads should be partnered with radio and Internet media forms in the key time slots when consumers are likely to be using all three forms.

“Our findings underscore the need to move away from a competitive mindset to a coordinated viewpoint,” Lin says, “as consumers increasingly use combinations of media forms in short periods.”

Whilst the model is not commercially available at the moment, Lin confirmed to me that she is happy to trial it with companies if any are interested.

I’m very much in the sceptical camp when it comes to viral marketing.  That’s not to say that I believe that the concept of an idea spreading in a viral way is wrong, merely that I don’t believe it’s something that we can predict or control.  I posted a piece back in 2011 about some Harvard research that cast doubt on the traditional notions of how ideas spread through a social network.

Some new research by Sharad Goel adds further weight to our understanding of just how ideas spread.  He kinda suggests that it doesn’t happen at all.

Goel and his colleagues studied seven different online scenarios to see how they spread:

1.  Yahoo! Voice, an online phone service started in 2004;
2. Zync, a Yahoo! Instant Messenger video-sharing application;
3. Friend Sense, a Facebook app introduced in 2009;
4. “The Secretary Game,” the online  version of a classic hiring test devised by psychologists;
5. Yahoo! Kindness, a charitable website launched in 2010;
6. News stories sent via Twitter in November 2011;
7. and Youtube links diffused through Twitter in November 2011.

The traditional thinking of viral memes is that they spread from friend to friend, which is known as multistep diffusion.  Goel’s data reveals that to be a complete myth.

“What we see is something qualitatively different. Most of the time it adopts and dies out within one generation,” Goel says.

For each of the seven scenarios examined, just 6% of them managed to get passed along more than once.  In other words, this notion that our content will magically spread throughout the six degrees of seperation that ties together the entire world is little but a myth.  If we’re lucky it might get seen by a friend of a friend.

The data suggests that a more realistic target to aim for is 20% spread.  So if you reach 10 people with your message, it’s realistic that another two people will then get to hear of it, which isn’t bad.

Of the outliers that were uncovered through the study, all were found to achieve their success through a traditional broadcast approach than through anything approaching viral.

Goel is following up his initial study with another that will look at what makes things popular online.  It’s currently under peer review and is expected to be released in March.  For anyone looking to spread an idea, product or piece of content it should be compulsory reading.

In the meantime, the following video should be well worth watching.

Skittles made a bit of a splash in the media world recently with a relaunch of their homepage that essentially created an overlay for their various web properties, starting with a Twitter page displaying all tweets mentioning the Skittles brand name.  You could also check out their Flickr photo gallery or their Facebook fan page.

Nice enough idea, but I suspect it will enjoy its five minutes of online fame before falling by the wayside.  However, imagine such an approach is used internally on the corporate Intranet.  The single great feature of the so called web 2.0 applications is that it puts you in touch with customers as never before.  The problem generally is that those customer voices are generally only heard by the web savvy people within a company.  The overwhelming consensus still seems to regard Twitter as an oddity that will have nothing of use for them.

Blammo, this would shoot that down instantly.  The modern marketing credo puts the customer at the very heart of everything the company does, it’s not just enough for marketing folks to care about the customer, it’s something that each and every employee should care about.  But unless you’re customer facing it’s often difficult to know what your customers are doing, what problems they’re having and generally how they’re finding your products.  Now that can change.

The Skittles website will probably fade into obscurity within weeks, if it hasn’t already done so, but by jove it doesn’t half offer up a great opportunity for how to put social media into the faces of each and every person in your company.

I’m currently reading Godel, Escher & Bach: An Eternal, Golden Braid (again) and the book makes excellent use of stories to help get across what are pretty weighty topics.  The book begins with the Zeno Paradox of the Tortoise and Achilles (you can read about the paradox here if you havn’t come across it before).  Douglas Hofstadter then re-uses Mr Tortoise and Achilles, with the odd cameo from Mr Crab and various other characters, to illucidate each chapter with a dialogue.

I’ve been a big fan of storytelling since university when John Seely Brown took on cult proportions during knowledge management lectures.  Seely Brown is the chief scientist at Xerox and has long advocated the use of stories in communicating ideas and sharing knowledge.

Ten tips for using stories in your brand communications

1. Stories come directly from the brand. If your brand has a great reason for being then making a story from it will be much easier.  Apple for instance have a great brand and regularly tell great stories with it.
2. Open your ears. Great stories are all around you.  Listen to your customers, your suppliers, your employees.  They’ll all have great stories about your company.
3. Amplify your customers. Once you’ve found a great story, make sure it’s nice and simple, then give it all your marketing support to get it out there.
4. Integrate your marketing. It’s one of those things that sounds so simple but is often neglected.  Each and every piece of marketing you do should reinforce the brand and tell a mini story of its own.
5. Get in touch with your inner child. As mentioned earlier, the art of story telling often gets lost once we enter adulthood.  Reconnect with your inner child and delve into stories to understand what makes them so special.
6. Don’t forget the purchase. The aim of the story is to get people buying so don’t forget the end goal.  For this you need to ensure that your story “ticks” the age-old behavioural triggers like emotion, contrast, egocentricity, the power of beginnings, etc.  Use them, and people will respond.  Avoid them at your peril.
7. Engage your body as well as your brain. Actions speak louder than words, as the saying goes, and it’s important that your actions toe the story telling line just as much as your words do.  Marketers often fall into the trap of focusing purely on acquisition but ensuring that customers are well serviced at every touch point is just as important (if not more so).
8. Leave some intrigue. People love a bit of mystery in their stories so don’t feel compelled to tell all of your company secrets.  Leave a little to the imagination and you’ll encourage people to try and solve the riddle.
9. Empower the customer. It might seem scary but once the story is out there it can often take on a life of its own as your customers get their hands on it.  Encourage this process as the more customers talk about you the more it shows they care.
10. Don’t forget to be real. It might be tempting to create a story that fits the message you’re trying to communicate, but people tend to have a pretty good bs sensor, so resist the urge to fabricate and stick with the stories that truely represent your company.