Yesterday I posted two examples of how some social media numbers are completely useless.

One of the examples was how I have almost 22,000 followers on Twitter, and yet I rarely get 1-2% of them to click on any link I share on Twitter.  I said we’d check out my traffic from yesterday and see what level of engagement I would have with those 22,000 followers.  Here’s the traffic sites from yesterday according to Google Analytics:

GA says there were 604 visitors here yesterday, 251 from referring sites, 226 direct traffic, and 78 from search engines.

For the record, SiteMeter says I had 597 visitors.  I tweeted out a link to yesterday’s post THREE times, and as of this writing, it was RTed 125 times.

And if we say that EVERY one of the 600 or so visitors I had yesterday came from viewing that link on Twitter, that still means that less than 3% of my Twitter followers clicked that link.  Obviously, not all of the traffic from yesterday came from Twitter, and not all of the traffic that DID, came from people that were following me.

I think there’s two key takeaways from this that I think we need to wrap our heads around:

1 – The level of engagement you have with your Twitter followers as a group is going to be low, and will likely be inversely proportional to the size of the group.  If you only have your 10 closest friends following you, obviously you will have a high level of engagement with that core group.  But as you grow to 1,000 followers, obviously you can’t be closely connected to all of those people, and their level of interaction and engagement with you will fall.

2 – The level of engagement you have with a certain portion of your Twitter followers will be MUCH higher than that of the larger group.  This point is somewhat speculative, but I would bet that most of the people that clicked yesterday’s link also click most of my links.   So while I may have a 1-3% engagement rate with my 22,000 followers as a whole, for those 500 or whatever number followers, I may have a 33% engagement rate.  Or some other number much larger than 1-3 % 😉

What do y’all think?  Does this make sense or sound like complete crap?  I think the core message here is to focus on your ‘fans’, and try to connect with them.  If you try to connect with everyone, then you’ll probably connect with no one.  But how do you figure out WHO is in that core group of fans, and who isn’t?  Or what about people that click some of my links, but not all?

Damn I’m getting a headache.