Twitter Study: New Data: How To Get More Clicks, Retweets and Followers

This is a guest post by Leo Widrich (@leowid on Twitter) of BufferApp, a Twitter application for scheduling Tweets.

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What does it take to be successful on Twitter? With over 100 million active Twitter users, it is sometimes very hard to know whether your Tweets are the ones being seen and clicked on.

Recently, after reaching over 1 million updates sent via Buffer, we have taken a look at all our users to see how performance has changed with it. The goal was to help anyone to get more out of Twitter based on this data.

The key result from the study:

“People that start to Buffer their Tweets increased clicks on links they posted by 200% within 2 weeks of using. The amount of retweets doubles on average. Finally Buffer users increase their follower count by 104 followers within 3 weeks on average.

As a result of this increase in exposure and engagement, their Klout score has risen by an average of 3.5 points within the first week of starting to use Buffer.”

Of course, the most important question here is, why does scheduling Tweets with Buffer give you these results? On top of everything else, there were 2 key reasons that triggered the increased performance through making use of Buffer.

1.) Tweeting At An Optimal Time

When people sign up for Buffer, the App picks 4 default times, which are optimized to give you a higher exposure for your Tweets. Now, whenever you add a Tweet to your Buffer, it will automatically be sent out for you every time at these optimal slots.

These better timings were the most important reason that people increase engagement with their Tweets. You don’t have to worry about when you are Tweeting and can simply drop the Tweet into your Buffer and let it do the rest.

2.) Tweeting More Often

The second reason people increased engagement with their Tweets significantly was because they were able to Tweet at a higher frequency more easily. You don’t have to go to a website to add Tweets to your Buffer – you can do so from wherever you are reading an article. You can add tweets from anywhere you are:

• Add a Tweet to your Buffer from any website with the browser extension (Chrome, Safari, Firefox)

• You can Buffer your retweets right from Twitter.com with just one click:

• You can Buffer Your Tweets from Google Reader right with the browser extension:

• Buffer Tweets via your mobile phone: This works from any device. Simply hit the “send via email” function whilst reading a post and send it to add@to.bufferapp.com. Automatically the App will take your headline in the subject line and link from the body and add it as a Tweet to your Buffer.

By allowing you to add Tweets more easily from anywhere you are, frequency of Tweeting went up dramatically. This was important as it gave followers more trust in your ongoing stream of great content.

How To Get The Most Out Of Twitter?

The people which went even above the 200% increase in clicks after starting to use Buffer had some very specific ways to use the App. They would spend about 10 minutes each morning to go through their Twitter lists and RSS readers and add the best content to their Buffer.

They were then able to provide the best content for their followers throughout the day and able to interact more. Buffer, as many users mentioned, would free them up to have more conversations, knowing that great content would already be Tweeted out for them.

The goal with Buffer is to help anyone be awesome on Twitter and make the most of it. What do you think of Buffer and the latest research? Could it help with your Tweeting too? Try it here: Buffer

Tagged as: social media, Twitter, twitter research, twitter tips