Do you tweet? – revisited

34 Replies to “Do you tweet? – revisited”

1. Mark,
   Now you need to undertake an analysis of the content and value of the tweet! The latter possibly ‘simply’ by re-tweets, the former a bit more difficult. Try not to loose too much sleep over it…..

   1. Bob – I will come back to this next week, with some more thoughts on ‘quality’ rather than ‘quantity’.

2. You can now add the British Arachnological Society’s (BAS) twitter account @BritishSpiders to the list. It was set up on the afternoon of Saturday 19th October 2013. As of this morning, (21st October), it has 82 followers. Its a small charity promoting this amazing group of invertebrates. It is the only charity exclusively devoted to spiders, harvestmen and pseudoscorpions in the UK, website: http://www.britishspiders.org.uk

   Please check us out and if you’ve noticed the ridiculous hype in the media over the noble false-widow spider, we provide a more balanced and more accurate information.

   My role in the BAS, apart from being the Yorkshire recorder for the national spider recording scheme (srs.britishspiders.org.uk) includes sitting on the Council and Conservation sub-committee; and tweeting.

   Thanks

   1. Richard – I am the 84th follower. Good luck.

      And have just noticed a tweet from @scienceheather saying that spiders ‘have been on the web for millions of years and now they can tweet’ – made me smile.

      1. Yes, I spied her tweet too ;p

3. Did you swallow “How to lie with statistics” whole?

   1. Martha – did you get out of bed on the wrong side?

      And could you expand on that remark without looking foolish?

4. What organisation is natures_voice?
   Never heard of them before.

   1. Redwood – that’ll be the RSPB!

      1. You mean the rspb !

5. What about number of followers compared to number of members Mark? The BOU (@IBIS-journal) has 2489 followers – that’s 240% of our our membership 😉

   1. Steve – that sounds good (I come top of that list too!). Would be quite difficult to do but worth someone (else) doing it!

      1. Mark, not too hard to do. As Steve has highlighted; smaller conservation charities appear to be doing better. For the number of followers as a percentage of members click here… http://keeptheendinmind.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/social-media-are-smaller-conservation.html

         1. Andrew – thank you. Not too hard to do provided you drop out a third of the organisations! You have WWF-UK’s membership wrong by the way (they would love to have 5 million members!).

            As my blog highlighted, smaller NGOs seem to be doing quite well but it is impossible to say really. It’s not a race that all have entered so how do we say who is in the lead? It depends how much the organisations want to do well – I’d be very surprised if all these NGOs are trying ‘equally hard’ (and what would that mean?). It’s rather difficult to say that the Bat Conservation Trust is really doing ‘better’ than the National Trust when the ‘loser’ has c16 times as many followers. Horses for courses (as always in life).

            It’s also clear that NGOs don’t just want to be followed by their existing members – they’d like to be followed by journalists, politicians, funders and a whole range of other people. All NGOs (and individuals) are fishing in the same pool of Twitter users. There is no reason why GWCT (for whom you work) can’t have as many Twitter followers as the NT if you say something interesting enough for long enough. And you might catch me up too – you should do with all your resources.

            1. Many thanks. Do you (or others?) have WWF UK’s membership number to hand? Agree that NGO’s don’t want to be followed by existing members alone, but I feel it is reasonable to assume that the number of followers should index an organisations membership.

            2. Andrew – WWF-UK now call their supporters ‘supporters’ and I think you can be a supporter in a variety of ways…

               You can’t expect me to find the data for you to do an analysis that I thought wasn’t worth doing – sorry, Andrew.

               Mark Avery has one supporter but he’d rather be talking to the NT’s 190,000 followers than to himself (or to the GWCT’s 2500-ish).

            3. There was an interesting discussion this morning on the radio about how big organisations run and use their social media. Many multi-nationals still simply appoint some social media-minded soul to run their streams and consider it as a very secondary level of communication, when these are the very organisations that need a social media expert, and can afford them.

               Smaller orgs can probably get away with this as they tend to be more specialist content driven, so having a social media savvy bod on their staff running their streams can work well, and even better with a bit of training and support.

            4. Steve – that sounds interesting. BBC? Sounds like Radio4? About what time please? I’ll try and catch up with it.

               It appears to me that the bigger the organisation gets the more difficult it is to be ‘social’. Some seem to have ‘anti-social’ social media!

               More on this from me next week.

      2. Not really that difficult, during my lunchtime I found member figures for the top 10 in your first list, and using followers as a % of their membership, this is what I come up with –

         1. @markavery – 11,107% 😉
         2. @_BCT_ – 333%
         3. @IBIS_journal – 240%
         4. @_BTO_ – 115%
         5. @savebutterflies – 75%
         6. @woodlandtrust – 8%
         7. @WWTworldwide – 7.5%
         8. @natures_voice – 6%
         9. @national trust – 5%
         10. @wwf_uk – 3%
         11. @wildlifetrusts – 2.5%
         12. @Birdlife_news – <1%

         I've snook the BOU in to the list of course. Some organisations have multiple Twitter accounts for different countries and departs (e.g. BirdLife) which are measurable here using just the main BirdLife account.

         It might indicate that the more specialist an organisation is (in terms of who they attract as members) the better they do here on social media, perhaps due to a wider audience have 'some' interest in their subject matter but not enough to warrant joining as a member. Also, the broader more general organisations (whose specialist member component will be swamped by the broader membership base from the 'general public') come out lower down by this measure, perhaps due to the fact that their activities already attract the widest audience but their social media only attracts the most active of their members.

         So in this respect the top 5 here doesn't surprise me with a large gap to the more generalist societies.

         1. Steve – gosh – everybody’s doing it. See comments to Andrew above. Your figures are similar to Andrew’s except you didn’t get WWF-UK so wrong!

            Interesting comments too – thank you.

            1. Very interesting! Even with slightly differing membership figures (depends on source I guess) the positions are pretty much the same in Andrew’s and my lists (e.g. BTO has 17,000 members, not 10,000 – still keeps them in second place in Andrew’s list).

               I think this is a great measure of how much wider an society reaches beyond its own membership, and with it, the potential to communicate with even more people in a more direct way, and hopefully bring a few more folk in to the society’s fold.

            2. Steve – although it obviously works better for small than large organisations. If every decision maker in the country were included in the NT’s 190,000 then that would certainly be better than the having a high ratio of followers to members for a small organisation – even though the NT have >3.5m members.

               There is nothing stopping the BOU, or Mark Avery, having 190,000 twitter followers except: 1) our appeal (mine is very low!) and 2) the amount of effort we put into it. So, I do prefer my measure of followers per £m income – because that includes a measure of how much effort an organisation can put into gaining followers.

6. Tweeting ? Blogging? What happens when electricity costs so much that we won`t be able to afford to use our computers, (I think I may be in the minority here though because I do not have a “smart phone” or whatever it`s called) ?
   I know – I`ll go out with my binoculars and have a mooch. And when it is raining outside I`ll read one of those thingywotsits, er what are they called ? a book, yeah, thats it…..

   1. It’s OK. When there isn’t any leccy your meter will stop going round.

      Smart ‘phones – I am reminded of a cartoon in Private Eye. When the servers all went down one day the streets were full of people sucking their thumbs.

7. Back in April the Deer Initiative had 145 followers as we were fairly new to the social media scene. We are proud to say that our number of followers has increased to 451 and growing every week. We feel that is it important to create a stronger connection with our Partners & the public about what we do.
   It is good to see our Partners (to name a few) The Woodland Trust, National Trust, RSPB and BASCnews making the top 20.

   Haven’t heard of us? The Deer Initiative is a UK based charity. Our mission: the achievement & maintenance of a sustainable population of wild deer in England & Wales.
   Why not follow us @DeerInitiative

   Mark, I am looking forward to reading your thoughts on ‘quality’ rather than ‘quantity’.

8. Lovely all this social media it’s enough to make a grown man….zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz…huh, what, oh yeah tweet that.

   1. Angry Dude – welcome!

9. Not a criticism but lots of rspb employees also have a twitter account which is mainly filled with rspb stuff and I guess other organisation employees do similar for their company.In the rspb case they have moved on to twitter and hardly now blog so lots of us are losers with much less useful information.

   1. Dennis – yes it’s true that many organisations have multiple twitter accounts so it’s difficult to compare like with like. The NT have loads and loads and loads – but still have the most following their ‘main’ ‘national’ Twitter account. The RSPB account @natures_voice (should that now be ‘giving nature a home?) still describes itself as ‘The official national twitter account for the RSPB’ – that’ll get them into trouble with the Scots when they notice (don’t tell them! Shhhh!). And the Wildlife Trusts are organised differently too.

      It’s a new world – and we still have to see if it is useful or not – and it it is – how useful.

      twitter is useful to me – a lot of the comments on this blog are never seen here on the blog – they are on twitter (and fewer on Facebook).

10. Interestingly (to me, at least) I did a similar exercise as part of a small piece of work I am doing on how smart phones can /could / might improve visitors’ experience of wildlife sites. I am deeply comforted that other people are content to spend time fumbling about with Twitter statistics. I felt it could become addictive.

    My conclusions, such as they were, included: that even the best performing wildlife organisations are way behind the best performing heritage ones: that the whole natural/human heritage sector is way behind the real big hitters; that working at it consciously makes a difference; that a lot of environmental people / organisations are improving fast; and that the Twittersphere community is not the same as visitors (and maybe not members).

    I was also hugely impressed at the speed, pace and accuracy with which Twitter spread the key points of the RSPB’s State of Nature fringe meeting at the Conservative party conference.

    Oooh, this is all so interesting.

    1. Susan – thank you. Your comment is certainly interesting. more difficult to do with Facebook though – isn’t it? Did you think about that at all?

       1. I didn’t look at Facebook in the same way. I may now be tempted to start counting likes on organisations’ Facebook pages. However, what I am really interested in is the amount of dialogue so I would have to faff about counting conversations; this is where I remember that I am not by nature a researcher!

          I am interested to see the amount of dialogue this topic has triggered.

11. I tried tweeting but quickly found it too much of a distraction from more productive activity. The danger is that many NGOs and charities see it as a an easy way out in campaigning. Huge numbers of people in different groups of the population have never heard of Twitter and would not go within a mile of it.
    A lot of the people we need to reach do not even have a computer.

    Elderly people (who actually vote!!), those who are in poorer sections of society etc on the whole are totally removed from this world of Twittering, much of which seems to revolve around a narrow world of not much substance.

    I think a lot of NGOs increasingly contain people who have only ever known Twitter/Facebook la la land and do not understand how to interact with people in the REAL world in campaign terms. It is easy to sit in an office sending out Tweets to people (most of whom will do nothing practical in campaign terms as a result), lot harder to stand on a High Street on a Saturday morning with a pasting table and talk to real people!

    There needs to be far more attention paid to reaching people outside of Twitter land. I would much rather hold a coffee morning and reach a few dozen people who actually vote in elections. Online has its place but its in danger of swamping the tried and tested methods.

    1. Chris – thanks. My view is that tweeting isn’t everything but any organisation seeking public support would be mad to ignore it – just as they would be mad to ignore TV, radio, books etc

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