What are the most influential tweets and what characteristics make them reach further than expected?
It appears – but not exclusively – that tweets that contain an engaging statement, an image, a hashtag and a hyperlink to a website (for further reading) engage a wider audience.
Here are the most popular tweets, month by month from 2015 from @TeacherToolkit. Information collated by Twitter Analytics. You can click on any of the images to open up the original content. It will prove an interesting read for teachers keen to explore the potential of social media.
First, some definitions:
- Impressions = When we say ‘impression’, we mean that a tweet has been delivered to the Twitter stream of a particular account. Not everyone who receives a tweet will read it, so you should consider this a measure of potential impressions.
- Clicks = The total number of clicks on a URL or detail within the tweet.
- Engagement = The total number of times a user interacted with a tweet, or someone who clicks anywhere on the tweet, including retweets, replies, follows, favorites, links, cards, hashtags, embedded media, username, profile photo, or tweet expansion.
- There are more definitions here.
January 2015:
The most popular tweet of this month was this screenshot of Notes From The Front Line by @DebraKidd;
Click to open tweet
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For those new to Twitter Analytics, here is an overview/analysis of all my tweets from January 2015.
During this time, the following analysis can be provided month by month. These are the January statistics below;
- Tweets = 1,303
- Tweet impressions = 7.4M
- Twitter profile visits = 25.7K
- Direct Twitter mentions = 5,187
- New Twitter followers = 4,220
February 2015:
The most popular tweet of this month was this sketchnote by @rebezuinga;
Click to open tweet
March 2015:
The most popular tweet of this month with over 30,000 impressions was this classic;
Click to open tweet
The tweet that had the most engagement (1,500 clicks) was this lovely sketchnote by @MrsPert1;
Click to open tweet
April 2015:
The most popular tweet of this month was this blog about marking below. It reached 12,000 impressions and this tweet gathered over 2,000 engagements.
Click to open tweet
May 2015:
The most popular tweet of this month, despite only 12 retweets, was a tweet about saying thank you to others. It gained over 10,000 impressions. I also announced my new book in this tweet with 1,500 engagements.
Click to open tweet
June 2015:
The most popular tweet of this month was this on well-being with over 17,000 impressions. This tweet on student conversations gathered over 110 ‘likes’.
Click to open tweet
July 2015:
The most popular tweet of this month was a framework for teaching assistants, published by The Education Endowment Foundation;
Click to open tweet
August 2015:
Obviously school is out for the summer, so, rather than just one tweet analysis which would be meaningless for educators reading and wishing to analysis what readers are viewing … here are the most popular tweets of this month which gathered over 17 million impressions! This was based on 15-50 tweets per day from July to September 2015.
Click to open the image
September 2015:
The most popular tweet of this month was publication of my new book. This single tweet was seen (impressions) by over 13,000 people (at the moment it was shared).
Click to open tweet
October 2015:
The most popular tweet of this month was about marking – What Not To Mark;
Click to open tweet
November 2015:
The most popular tweet of this month was an old tweet I have shared before. Workload clearly becoming an issue for all readers during the month of November …
Click to open tweet
December 2015:
The most popular tweet of this month was my wish-list to Father Christmas; this tweet on well-being – with over 100 re-tweets – has also reached a wide audience!
Click to open tweet
I also squeezed in one last blogpost on New Year’s Eve. Despite the low Twitter statistics, this blog generated over 15,000 visitors and over 30,000 views in 24 hours!
Click to open tweet
Twitter Analytics:
This analysis by Twitter is free. If you are interested in what works on social media, you should really be looking at this data. There is so much to discover.
For example, I can see that on average, my Twitter account gains another 3,500 new followers each month! My current follower audience size (as I write this) is 119,918. That’s 9,796 more than the same time 90 days ago which means I have gained around 109 new followers per day.
73% of my audience is based in the United Kingdom, with 14% based in London where I live and work. 9% of my readers are from the USA and this blog has been read in 211 countries! Overall, 63% of Twitter accounts included in the analysis state that they are female. I would not be able to know this information without Twitter Analytics.
If you can fathom out the secret formula for sharing engaging content, discovering what works on social media and what doesn’t, then do let me know.
TT.
