Retweets NOT A Good Metric For Twitter Influence/Success
Written by Robert Bacal | 
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| Social Media Platforms - Twitter |
Oh Dear, Oh My. It's what we don't know, and don't ask about that kills us.
Everyone assumes that the number of retweets is an indicator of someone's influence, or success. The more you are retweeted, the more influence you have. And the more people are "engaging" with you. Nope. Don't think so.
I've been slowly watching the number of people retweeting my posts, particularly since we've been so active in building up our free social media library and resource center. We're tweeting more links, and we're getting a lot more retweets.
"So", I says to myself, "Robert, this is great. More people are coming to your blog and the library, and after all, I'm a writer, and as a writer, I want people to read what I write.
Since I track site visits (anonymously - I can't identify visitors) I can see what pages people are coming from, and their views of my site(s).
I thought my analytics were broken. I checked again. All these people retweeting the great articles, where are they?
Finally, it twigged.
A good percentage of the people who retweet links to the articles I mention are NOT reading them, or clicking on the links before they retweet.
Influence? Nope. I won't hazard a guess at why they pass on things they haven't read. It hardly matters, and I'm grateful anyway, but it is clear that retweets is having a tiny tiny impact on the number of visitors to my sites.
All in all, you'd rather be retweeted than not. However, as a metric for influence, or even an indicator of being successful on Twitter. No.
Funny, though. Nobody talks about these things. Nobody asks the right questions. Everyone assumes.
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