Here at immediate future we think that the best way of measuring how well you’re doing on Twitter is by looking at the number of times you get retweeted. As we’ve previously written, retweets are the means by which messages spread virally across Twitter, so the more interesting your conversations are, the more you can expect to see your posts retweeted by your followers and their followers.

While many brands tend to think the number of followers they’ve got as the best measure of success, we think that’s a flawed approach simply because it’s so easy to pump up your follower numbers that the figure is largely irrelevant. OK, you’ve managed to persuade 5,000 people to follow you on Twitter, but how many of them are really paying attention to what you’re saying?

Retweet volume is a much better indicator of how well you’re getting your message across on Twitter, if you’re saying interesting things and people are paying attention, they will retweet your posts. Obviously, having a higher number of followers helps, but only if you’re engaging with them.

It’s better to engage with 100 followers than to be ignored by 5,000.

We looked at the sample group of 140 brands in our recent report ‘The Truth about Twitter’ and ran them all through www.retweetrank.com to see how they compared. The site assigns each Twitter account a percentile – so for example, if you’re in the top 1% of retweeted users, that’s very good; if you’re in the top 5%, that’s not as good but still ok, but if you were in the top 95%, you suck.

Bear in mind that a huge amount of Twitter accounts have few followers and are infrequently updated, so it’s safe to assume that around 80% of all Twitter users never get retweeted.

Next, think about those top 20% of Twitter users who do get retweeted, at least occasionally. Most of those are going to be private individuals, brands are only going to make up a tiny percentage of those users. However, when you consider that a business is investing resources into using Twitter specifically for the purpose of reaching out to its audience, you would expect any brand that was doing a half decent job of it to be in at least the top 5% of retweeted users.

Guess what we found? Out of 140 brands, 40 were in that bottom 80% of Twitter users who never get retweeted. This means that 40 large, well known brands, are completely failing at Twitter because they are not provoking conversations with their followers.

Another 40 of those brands made it into the top 20% of retweeted users, but that’s not really difficult since you typically only need to get a handful of retweets a month to get there. Considering these guys are, presumably, employing communications professionals to manage their Twitter feeds, that’s a pretty poor result.

In the top 10% there are 23 companies, which is a relatively respectable place to be in the rankings. Ideally, you want to be in the top 1% of retweeted users, who can expect their tweets to be copied and republished hundreds of times a week, if not more – 37 of the 140 brands we looked at were occupying this top 1%.

To cut a long story short, what this really means is that approximately two thirds of brands on Twitter aren’t engaging with their followers particularly well.

If you want to find out more, download one of our reports: The Truth about Twitter, or Twitter for PR and Marketing Professionals.

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Newspapers, as everybody knows, are still struggling to get to grips with the internet. For a few years they threw all of their resources into establishing a strong online presence and trying to pull in as big an audience as possible, under the optimistic belief that if enough people were reading the online content, a viable business model must somehow evolve sooner or later.

That business model hasn’t materialised, and the publishers are left grappling with the long running problem of how to make money out of online content, especially when advertising seems to be plummeting.

Some of them have cried foul, and blamed news aggregating services (primarily Google News) for unfairly profiting from their content. Google’s public response to this accusation was to point out how incredibly easy it would be for the newspapers to prevent their content from being indexed by search engines, if that’s what they really want.

Of course, that’s not what newspaper publishers want, and it’s highly unlikely that any of them followed Google’s advice for blocking search engines from their sites.

If you browse through the comments left by people on the numerous blog posts dedicated to this subject, it becomes clear that few people have any sympathy for the newspapers. They are largely viewed as arrogant, plodding, old media dinosaurs that deserve to die if they can’t adapt their business models to the new online world.

There’s a big problem with this. Most businesses which took a beating during the internet revolution struggled because they were replaced by a better online alternative, but that’s not the case with newspapers. Healthy democracies depend upon the kind of high quality, impartial reporting that a properly functioning free press delivers and despite the evolution of citizen journalism, right now nobody is capable of providing a suitable alternative to the service provided by our best newspapers.

The free press is too important to society for us to sit back and let the markets decide its fate. If we don’t find a way for independent journalism to survive, we risk irreparably damaging one of the fundamental components of the democratic process.

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According to the latest predictions from research firm, Forrester, social media marketing spend in the US will rise from $716 million in 2009 to £3,113 million in 2014. The accuracy of these figures may be up for debate – all the research in the world isn’t going to tell you how the world will change in five years time, and the beauty of the being an analyst is that few people ever test your long term predictions – but it certainly points to a clear trend, which is more useful than any attempts to pin precise numbers on the potential size of the industry.

Source: Forrester Research

As the chart shows, social media is expected to be the fastest growing online marketing sector by a significant margin (although, unsurprisingly, mobile is also expected to grow significantly, but people have been expecting that to explode for a long time now).

The reasons for this should be clear, the marketing industry is currently experiencing a sea change for a wide range of reasons, including:

• Modern consumers are marketing savvy and cynical of traditional brand messaging, you can’t spoon-feed them your pitch and expect them to swallow it any more
• Conventional advertising is losing its effectiveness. People are increasingly using their PVRs (SKY+ boxes) to skip through TV adverts, internet users are developing ad-blindness, print and radio are also suffering
• The internet is making it easier for consumers to share their brand experiences with each other – this is increasingly informing their purchasing decisions more than the brand’s own communications

People want to deal with businesses that respect their intelligence by engaging them in interesting conversations, rather than doggedly pushing sanitised, on-message marketing blurb into their face through tightly controlled old-world channels. Consumers are saying: If you want my attention, you need to talk to me like a human being.

This is what social media is all about, and this is the future of marketing – figuring out how to talk to your customers (and other stakeholders) like real people  - and the figures from Forrester support this idea. It’s really only a matter of time before social media forms the core of all marketing activity.

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Over the past year social media gurus have been banging the Twitter drum very loudly, and everybody in the PR and marketing industry must by now be at least dimly aware that they need to pay attention to the service. But apart from the small handful of high profile case studies (Dell, Starbucks, etc.) which get trotted out in almost every discussion on the subject, there seems to be very little hard data on how businesses are really using Twitter in their comms activities.

A few months ago we decided that wasn’t good enough. We know that there are compelling benefits to be gained from reaching out to audiences on Twitter, but if we want to convince other people of that, we need to show them how brands in their own market sectors are already doing it.

So, we got to work producing mini-case studies of 140 leading UK and international brands across a range of industry sectors, and put them all in one monster report. We analysed qualitative information, such as the subject matter and writing style of each brand, along with quantitative data such as frequency of updates and how often Twitter users ‘re-tweet’ the brand’s messages to their own friends.

As well as providing insight into individual companies’ use of Twitter, compiling all of this data also allowed us to build a much broader picture of how brands in general are using the service. It’s a very comprehensive and in-depth report on the current status of Twitter usage amongst high-profile brands, and if you’d like to get hold of your free copy all you have to do is head over to the download page on our website: The Truth about Twitter

In case you’re wondering whether your company is included, here’s the complete list of brands featured in the report, in alphabetical order:

Action Aid
All Saints
Amnesty UK
Andrex
Argos
Asda
Asos
BBC
Bigmouth Media
BMI Baby
BMW
British Airways
British Red Cross
BT
Burger King
Butlins
Cancer Research UK
Canon
Cardiff University
Cardiff University International Office
Carphone Warehouse
Centre for Policy Studies Think Tank
Channel 4
Cheap Flights
Christian Aid
CNN
Communities Uk
Compare The Meerkat
Cruise Thomas Cook
Debenhams
Dell
DIUS
Domino’s
Domino’s
Easy Jet
eBay
E-Consultancy
Electrolux
Eon
Expedia
FairtradeUK
Financial Times
Fly Cheapo
Ford
Ford
Forrester
Friends of the Earth
GAME
GE
GE
GE
Get My Finance Ltd
Google
GreenPeace
GreenPeace UK
Greggs
Guardian
H&M
HM Treasury
Honda UK
Huggies
Hyatt Concierge
IAB
IBM
IBM
Ikea
Ikea
ING
Innocent
Institute for Public Policy Research
Intel
ITV
Kodak
KPMG
Last Minute.com
Leeds Metropolitan University
Leeds University
LGBlogUK
Liberal Democrats
Linked In
London University News
London university’s External system
Loughborough Students Union
Love Film
Macdonald Hotels
Macmillan Cancer
Marketing
Marmite
Marriott
Mercedes
Metro
More Eco
MTV
National Express
National Trust
Nestle
Nokia
Norton Safe Web Software
O2
O2
Oxfam
PC World
Pizza Hut
Planet Green
RSPCA
SAP
SBAC
Shell
Siemens energy
Sky
Sony
Sri Lankan Airways
Starbucks
Teeside University
Tesco’s
The Foreign Office
Thomson Reuters
Times Higher Education
Times Online
T-Mobile
TomTom
Topshop
Toshiba
Toyota Europe
Travel Lodge Ireland
UK Parliament
Unicef
Vauxhall
Virgin
Visit Britain
Vodafone
Walkers
Warwick Careers
Wateraid
Waterstone’s
Weightwatchers
Whole Foods
WWF
Yahoo!
York Alumni

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