Your campaign has targeted newspaper reporters for decades and bloggers for years. But what about individual Twitter users? Can an individual Twitter user reach a large enough number of opinion leaders, activists and voters to make it worth your while?
I have long wondered if there is a way to compare the reach of one's Twitter account to that of a blog. Blog and website traffic is easily measured with free services such as Google Analytics and other more sophisticated programs used by most web publishers. These services tell web publishers exactly how many impressions their site is serving and where that traffic is coming from.
Twitter is much more difficult to measure. Many URL shorteners provide detailed analytics on links posted on Twitter (see bit.ly and awe.sm), but aside from link tracking, there is no universal way to measure how many "impressions" you are serving with your tweets - in other words, how many of your followers are actually reading your tweets.
A few weeks ago, I posed the following question to my Twitter followers:
Is there any way to accurately compare impressions served between a Twitter account and a blog (assuming you have traffic data on the blog)?
Not surprisingly, no one had a solution to my dilemma.
After doing a little more digging of my own, Klout.com CEO and Co-Founder, Joe Fernandez reminded me of a statistic the free service provides that may be the best answer to this issue yet - "True Reach". Fernandez (who was gracious enough to consult with me on this piece) explained to me that True Reach allows you to, "...look beyond the follower count and understand how many people are actually paying attention to your content."
If you are not familiar with Klout, put simply, Klout measures influence across the social web. Klout is the only influence measuring Twitter app featured on Twitter.com's homepage and has been cited by leading social media gurus when comparing the influence of various Twitter users.
Klout's "True Reach" statistic is the most unique and accurate statistic I have found to date to compare a specific Twitter user's following to a website's "Absolute Unique Visitor" statistic. Klout defines "True Reach" by the following:
This is the size of your engaged audience. This number will be smaller than the number of followers you have because we subtract spam followers and inactive accounts. Klout calculates influence for each individual relationship, so we also subtract the people who you have little influence over. For example, if you are followed by a person who follows 5,000 other people and you two have never interacted, share very few common friends, and generally don't tweet about the same topics, it's likely that your tweets are barely seen by this person, and you probably have little to no influence over them. On the other hand, if a person takes the time to put you on a Twitter list, it means they really value the content you produce, and will increase the influence you have over them.
True Reach is broken into the following subcategories:
Reach
- Are your tweets interesting and informative enough to build an audience?
- How far has your content been spread across Twitter?
Demand
- Are people adding you to lists and are those lists being followed?
- How many people did you have to follow to build your count of followers
Factors measured: Followers, Friends, Total Retweets, Follower/Follow Ratio, Followed Back %, @ Mention Count, List Count, List Followers Count.
- Are your follows often reciprocated?
So how can Klout's True Reach be used to compare impressions served between a Twitter profile and a website? Let's look at an example:
According to my Klout profile, my True Reach score is 1,005, meaning that Klout calculates that 1,005 of my Twitter followers, on average, are reading my tweets (a relatively small number compared to other users with much larger followings). This number, I believe, is comparable to an "Absolute Unique Visitor" number a traditional website publisher might report. On average, I tweet 15 times a day (excluding @replies which are viewed by a smaller universe of people). Multiplying my 15 tweets by my 1,005 True Reach number, my Twitter account serves an average of 15,075 impressions every day. By comparison, the St. Petersburg Times' Buzz Blog, widely considered the most popular blog in Florida politics, serves an average of roughly 14,285 impressions per day.
This analysis gets even more interesting when you take into account that Klout's True Reach statistic does not take into account retweets of your original tweet - the most viral aspect of Twitter. For example, a single tweet I posted a few weeks ago reached 8,263 unique Twitter users through retweets, according to TweetReach.com - that's more than 8 times Klout's True Reach number.
As Twitter continues to expand as a primary blogging platform, it will be increasingly more important to measure the reach of influential Twitter users and compare them to the reach of off-Twitter blogs. This model, while admittedly flawed, seems to be a good start. Communications professionals inside and outside of politics would be wise to take a hard look at the True Reach of Twitter's most influential users important to their campaign or cause.
I have been impressed by a few political campaigns and committees who have reached out to me and other Twitter users on a regular basis as part of their press outreach - namely Rob Simmons, Marco Rubio, Gus Bilirakis and the NRSC. These few are the exception, far from the rule.
It is no longer an option (or at least a wise one) to ignore Twitter users in your blogger/press outreach for your campaign. The numbers don't lie. Campaigns that ignore influential Twitter users do so at their own peril. Influential Twitter users with massive reach can be just as, if not more influential than off-Twitter blogs and websites. Hopefully you can use the above model to determine who those users are and incorporate them into your campaign's communication outreach.
