Twitter Influencers: How I got +850 % Impressions & What I Learned

Social media marketers are silly. At the same they keep preaching (and bragging) loudly how fast things and trends change in social media landscape, but on the other hand, they’ve been declaring that “this is The Year of the Influencer” at least four years in a row now. However, very often even professionals seem to forget (or outright not know) that not all influencers have to be persons.

Especially on channels like Twitter and Instagram, accounts that are e.g. parodies (like in my case) or content curators, can have massive follower bases. These are my findings from a tweet that gained +850% more impressions and prompted almost +1000% more profile visits than my average 140-characters do.

The tweet

Main takeaways

1. The content was already good. The joke was simple, but clever. It’s smack in the middle of a Venn diagram consisting of people who’re into either IoT or IFTTT, yet still not excluding neither group. I didn’t create the IFTTT recipe itself (in fact, it’s one of the most popular recipes in the service), but that’s not relevant in this context.
2. I didn’t try to push the influencer account to react to it. In fact, I used its handle almost like a hashtag. The content sold itself to the influencer. (“Linking to influencers just so they’ll share your content” is #1 on Buffer’s list on Old School Social Media Tactics That Are No Longer Effective)
3. This highlights the fact that you can’t push any content to any influencer. Even if you pay for the influencer to share your stuff, it’s quite likely that you won’t see any significant result due to the fact that the influencer’s audience – however big – just don’t match yours.
4. Big audiences are often scattered around the world, on different time zones. This kept the tweet gaining engagement for a longer period of time, increasing the retweet-ripple-effect by an order of magnitude. Average tweet’s lifetime can be counted in minutes, seconds even – this one’s lifetime could be counted in days.
5. Twitter’s statistics are a bit misleading. Detailed tweet activity claims that the tweet got me 8 new followers, when the real number is actually somewhere closer to 20-30.
6. The level of engagement was good, settling on around 7% after a couple of days. That’s pretty decent with over 200K impressions!

Over to you

So that’s how I broke my Twitter for a week (notifications were a complete mess on all platforms, and the retweets are still coming in almost two weeks later). I’m fairly confident that my findings can be applied to other (twitter) influencer marketing cases as well.

What are your experiences with Twitter influencers? Have you managed to ninja your tweet on their radar? Let me know in the comments below or tweet to me, @joellatto, right away!