Study Says Longer Tweets Are Better

Twitter for real estate is a curious strategy. There was quite a bit of discussion about Twitter in some of the Facebook groups that I am in. #thatsfunny

In all seriousness, when WAV Group evaluates the effectiveness of social media marketing and advertising (those are two different things), the numbers prove that Facebook is far more effective in every matrix of reporting. The data suggests that Facebook is core, Twitter is niche.

If you do market on Twitter as part of your surround sound system, you likely already know that Twitter extended the number of characters from the old 140 to the new, abundant 280. A study published by SocialFlow outlines the following results from their research:

Average Clicks

This is interesting. If your Twitter strategy is to get people to click though to your website, the number of characters in your post does not really matter. Their article publishing the research tells us that they evaluated 30,000 publisher tweets. I have no clue what the 94.46 means – but that is certainly not the click-through rate! Suffice it to say that the click-through rate does not seem to vary in relation to the longer or shorter tweets.

Retweets did show a significant increase in engagement. Looks like the publishers in the study were doubling the number of retweets. This is great news for the ability to extend your messaging beyond your group of followers and reach their followers. Think "new business."

Average Likes

Who does not like to see the love from the followers you have on Twitter? The good news is that the more you say, the more your followers like you. Although not quite as significant as the enhanced performance found with retweets, the number of followers that will like your posts jumps up dramatically.

To be sure, Twitter made a good decision in extending the number of characters from 140 to 280. Now your opportunity is to learn how to tweet in the extended format to improve your online effectiveness. Twitter is not for everyone, but plenty of people are into it – mostly media, marketing, and technology folks. We find this to be a particularly effective way to develop relationships with local journalists. Remind your PR folks!