Twitter's Long Tail
People who should know better run Twitter down. After a friend said something like, “my three friends crazy enough to Tweet,” it didn’t take a huge leap of faith to know my @ScentTrail tweets were one of the three “crazies”. I was worked up enough to write Curating Twitter Democracy about Twitter’s Internet marketing value. There was only one problem – my Twitter Return On Investment (ROI) estimates based on my Technorati article Facebook and Social Media Marketing's 450 Retweets was way off.
A friend read my piece and told me about TweetReach, a cool web application that provides Twitter reach by Twitter handle with exact follower numbers. My flawed first analysis used an average Twitter follower count of 126. Look at how short such an average falls for the top five people who ReTweeted Facebook and Social Media Marketing:
@Coachforyou Followers 220,458
@lorirtaylor Followers 45,670
@imarketman Followers 37,278
@TwiterPreneur Followers 23,518
@TonyMackGD Followers 12,199
Top 5 Total Followers 339,123
(Top 5 = 84% of all impressions)
Total Impressions 414,399
My original reach estimate of 56,826 was off by a factor of almost six. TweetReach’s report created a familiar graph, one I recognized immediately by looking at the table data. The Retweet distribution was a perfect Anderson Long Tail. I saw long tails in every merchandising segment we created when I was a Director of E-Commerce. There was always a long tail no matter how thin I sliced our categories or subcategories.
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