twitter chat benchmarks

twitter chat benchmarksHey, everybody. I’ve been doing a Twitter chat for the past five weeks called #failchat to prepare the market for my GlitchPath launch.

Each week, I posted a topic and talked to my audience about overcoming failure. We talked about politics, relationships, and even interpersonal communication.

If I had to describe the chat in one word, I would call it unsuccessful.

The chat was great. The people who joined were amazing. But, from a marketing standpoint, there are specific, short-term Twitter chat benchmarks that I failed to hit.

  1. Reaching an attainable size of an existing audience. Anything worth doing takes some time to grow, but I’ve now learned that a majority of my audience cannot make themselves available at the scheduled time. You can hold the best party, but it’s not a party if your guests can’t make it.
  2. Week-over-week growth. I love it when marketers hope for viral and organic growth. The only thing that grows organically is a baby, and then it pops out of your womb and makes unreasonable demands of your time and energy. When it comes to marketing, you need to put some money behind your efforts. Especially social media marketing. So I invested in #failchat marketing before/during/after the chats, but it didn’t pay off in week-over-week growth.
  3. Diversity. It’s great to host a chat with people you know. The true test of the idea is whether or not new people see the conversation and join the fray. While we had some new people join #failchat, it wasn’t enough to justify the advertising spend.

So I’m sitting here in my pajamas on a Sunday morning eating oatmeal (which always gets stuck in my teeth) and looking at the data and chat history. The numbers aren’t great, and more importantly, I don’t want to spend any more money. So #failchat is over in its current iteration.

I love the concept of jumping on Twitter and connecting with people, so I reserve the right to do pop-up Twitter chats to talk about why current issues are failing. But Twitter chat benchmarks don’t lie. That’s why I’m ending my weekly #failchat on Mondays at 1PM.

It was super fun while it lasted, and I hope everybody enjoyed it.Thanks again for being a willing participant in the ongoing experiment that is my life. Now I’m going to finish this oatmeal.

7 Comments

  1. So sorry to hear this. It was the most refreshing thing to come along in quite awhile. Hoping for a comeback. Thank you Laurie for a grand experiment.

  2. We are worlds apart, but I love your brutal honesty. Here’s my .02 worth-

    1) Relationships and connections. I want to have a conversation and read deep thoughts, Twitter is counterintuitive to this end. I don’t tweet and yes, the timeliness of tweets could be a factor why.

    2) Your writing is fantastic, thorough, and thought provoking; why would I bother reading tweets?

    3) Point 1 and 3 are somewhat related. If you’re not diverse how can expand your market?

    I’ll skip the tweets and continue reading your posts since the content is real, opinionated, and refreshing, even to a irredeemable old redneck from Alaska.

    Have a wonderful Sunday and thanks for the great read =)

  3. I loved the idea, and read the thread afterwards. Unfortunately the time for me was not good (I am the other side of the world). Am looking forward to GlitchPath though!

  4. I would have loved to join, but it fell right in the middle of my workday. =/

    I love Twitter chats, but they do tend to feel ephemeral. Sure, they can be archived and organized into readable threads, but it’s tough to get into them unless you really can be there in the moment.

    My safest bet for marketing is still blogging in combination with social media – it can be slow-burning, but continually building up SEO and credibility seriously aids in new customers discovering your brand.

    I get the sense that part of the goal of the chat was to engage your market and learn from them, as much as establishing a relationship. Maybe something like a podcast, where you can still share messages/comments from participants would make sense?

    Best of luck, and I’m looking forward to learning more!

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