By Drew Schulthess
Digital Influence Strategist
Over three years ago, Jack Dorsey had a simple idea of having a better understanding of what his friends were doing via the Internet. With the execution of his idea in the form of an easy interface and a compelling brand delivery, his new creation has exploded into one of the most popular social networking platforms in the world today.
From Twitter’s inception, through its early days of expansion and extending all the way through its extraordinary and unprecedented growth period, one core delivery has remained the same—simplicity.
When you think about it, very little has changed. Just recently, Twitter launched a new homepage that more tightly integrates Twitter search. Over the years, there have been some subtle changes in the interface; but for the most part, the game has remained the same.
I’m not trying to say Twitter should deviate from its proven model of simplicity. But I do have some suggestions. Here, we are about to share a few things that, if Twitter were to mix it up, we would like to see integrated into their offering. Or, perhaps an enterprising API developer can beat them to the punch (if the apps don’t already exist!). We challenge you to think ahead and share any ideas on Twitter features that you would love to see too!
If these features weren’t built into Twitter’s actual interface, maybe they could be contained within an email. The current “new follower” emails don’t contain a lot of intelligence on your followers except some baseline statistics. As you read these, imagine some of the features being included in your next follower email!
#1: Tweet Beat – Building a quality base of people you follow on Twitter can be tricky. How much time do you really have to look at the person and/or company you are about to follow? One minute? Two? Five? If you have all the time in the world to sit there and sift through tweets, I congratulate you! But, if you are like me and the rest of the world, you can’t sit around in your sweatpants and analyze every Twitter user before you follow them. With this in mind, we could all use a tool to help us sift through the clutter. Tweet Beat would be the heartbeat of your profile in the form of an intelligent aggregator that analyzes all tweets, re-tweets and activities on Twitter. This could evolve into something more complex, but here is my take at a version 1.0.
Tweet Beat would share three principal categories of data in the form of a nice looking pie chart of each user’s activity:
- The percentage of original content a user tweets—would you follow someone if you know they never actually contribute any original content?
- Re-tweet Ratio – the number of times you re-tweet divided by overall number of tweets
- Engagement Ratio – average number of actual clicks vs. total impressions on links shared. This is a Bitly/Co-tweet Plugin that shares this data with Twitter.
#2 Geo Tweet – This one is real simple. Within the Twitter interface enable users to see what geographic locations their “Tweets” are reaching. Using this information you might want to follow someone that has good visibility in part of the world that you don’t. Also you might be able to write some posts or make some Tweets that are tailored to a specific location. Got any followers in the country you are about to visit? If not, maybe you should get some!
#3 Tweet Potential – You may have already heard of a tool called TweetReach, if not we totally recommend checking it out. TweetReach enables you to see how far a particular tweet has traveled by delivering the overall number of impressions. This tool is awesome!
But what if you could click on a user directly and see someone’s Tweet potential? Tweet Potential would enable you to see the potential reach of your tweets as well as the reach value of everyone who you follow. This number would go beyond estimated impressions that are equal to a follower base. Instead, what if there was a way to calculate how often your followers read your Tweets? You can’t just assume that all of your followers are going to see your Tweets, right? That is impossible! If this number was truly available you could get an average percentage value of the number of followers that actually are exposed to your Tweets. It seems like Twitter should be able to provide this number by the enormous amount of user data they must be collecting every day.
How does this manifest into a calculation? Example below:
Tweet Potential Example
MasterTweeper (made this up) has 27,555 followers.His Tweet Realized Impression Rate (made this up, too!) is 15%. That is, 15% of his following base on average sees his tweets.
MasterTweeper’s Tweet Potential is approximately 4,133 (27,550 X 1.5)!
How does this number apply to you? Well, if you can get good old MasterTweeper to re-tweet you, you can gain an estimated 4,133 impressions! Not bad huh?
In reality, these types of features and analytics are probably a long way away. But, you have to wonder how long will it take before Twitter users start asking for more—or worse yet for Twitter, how long it will be before a competitor creates a more intelligent interface.
Time, as always, will tell. In the meantime, happy tweeting to all!