As I promised last week, here is the latest in a series of posts about the way in which UK mobile phone carriers engage online (specifically, on Twitter). To recap, I aim to develop a top-to-toe analysis of Twitter presence. It’s going to be comprehensive, so I’m going to split it across multiple bite-sized posts and share the full findings in an aggregated deck when it’s complete.
I want firstly to paint a picture of the scale and nature of UK mobile carriers’ Twitter engagement; secondly to try to glean an understanding of the overarching strategy they have adopted, and thirdly to understand the tactics they use in support of that strategy. I’ll concentrate on data in the first few posts, and wrap it all together in a best practice analysis towards the end.
When talking about UK mobile carriers, I’m including O2; Vodafone; Orange; T-Mobile; Virgin Mobile and Three. When I talk about UK engagement, I’ve restricted my scope slightly: several of these companies deploy multiple Twitter accounts for a range of purposes (eg Orange has created a large range of content channels on Twitter). However, I’ve only looked at accounts which explicitly or implicitly position themselves as the main brand presence(s) on Twitter. The Twitter accounts included by this criteria are:
T-Mobile:
Virgin Media:
Three (Hutchison-Whampoa):
None (yep, despite the importance of Twitter to their flagship product range, they don’t have a presence themselves. I won’t overlook them entirely, but obviously there aren’t going to be any engagement / activity metrics).
So without (much) further ado, here’s an overview of significant quants.
1. Quantitative Data
Data Collection
A quick note about data collection. It’s notoriously hard to create and mine out a meaningful archive of Twitter data, so this analysis is based on a staggered method for data collection, including use of third party search and analysis tools (where they are reliable and meaningful), and on two manual sweeps for data using Twitter itself that I made in July 2009 and January 2010.
With no month-to-month granularity in the data, the two sweeps in July 2009 / January 2010 are key to a (crude) understanding of the point at which each company moved from a a passive to an active engagement.
a. Followers / Following
The number of followers to a Twitter account is frequently cited as a surrogate for influence. This is well-documented as nonsense for a number of reasons, but there are some useful insights from follower numbers if you consider them cautiously. For mobile phone carriers in particular, there are likely to be several drivers for new followers – including vanilla marketing activities (eg special offers), and pushed communications (eg news and other content). The defining factor however is likely to be the degree to which each company has decided to accept the use of Twitter as a backchannel for customer service. I’ll cover this in depth in the analysis.
And here is a view of the number of accounts that each follows:
Observations:
- “First engagements” with Twitter were spread over nearly a year (and that “first engagement” includes the totally passive step of registering an account – I used Twitter Counter to verify the date of account registration). That’s a long stretch between laggards and leaders
- O2 was the first to embrace Twitter (with some agency help), and is also the most engaged
- There is a clear distinction between O2 / Vodafone / Virgin Media, which have experienced explosive growth in followers, and the rest, which appear to be growing slowly but steadily. There are a few possible catalysts for this type of growth – more in the analysis to follow
- From the “heavy users”, O2 / Vodafone appear to practice the tactic of “reciprocal following”, but Virgin Media does not
b. Updates
Update activity (ie number of tweets) is obviously a key measure of engagement. Like so much of the really interesting data (eg click throughs to other properties), direct messages (DMs) are private, and hence non-measurable without permission of the account owner. Updates to the public timeline are however, so here is a summary:
And here is an approximate breakdown of the average number of updates / month (calculated as a simple division of the number of tweets to the public timeline at each data collection sweep, by the number of months [rounded up] that the account had been registered). The left column for each account is the figure as of July 2009, the right column as of January 2010.
Observations:
- The same three companies – O2; Vodafone; Virgin Mobile – dominate again. There seems to be a correlation between activity and engagement (obvious huh?)
- With the exception of T-Mobile, all companies are ramping up their activity in Twitter – tweets / day are rising noticeably
- The activity of Virgin Media has taken off explosively. I’m going to make a small spoiler for later posts, and highlight that the triage (and sometimes resolution) of customer service issues has been a significant feature in this activity. Wouldn’t it be great to pull in some business performance metrics here too? The overall cost of the Twitter engagement; corresponding trends in costs of other customer communication channels (yes, like the call centres…). Some more theoretical stuff to follow in the analysis
c. Lists
Twitter lists are a relatively new feature, and as such I only have data from my final sweep in January 2010. They were introduced as another feature to improve readability in custom timelines, and introduce some more social sharing functionality. However, it definitely feels like there is more potential to their use than that, and like many others, I’m very interested in ways they can be used as a performance metric, to triangulate a view of broadcast influence alongside other data points such as follower numbers (which are rendered extremely suspect by custom list functionality in third party Twitter reader software).
Without further comment (yet), here is a summary of the number of user-created Twitter lists each of these accounts appears on:
Observations:
- There they are again: O2; Vodafone; Virgin Media
- T-Mobile also appears prominently here: late to the party, back in the pack or worse in respect of other raw quants, but frequently listed. More on this in the analysis
Next post:
Hope you’ve found this useful. I’ll post again in a few days with a qualitative overview, after which I’ll start to get into some of the serious issues of differences in strategy and tactical implementation (as well as some thoughts on how these companies could / should be measuring the outcome of their engagement).
Endnote:
I hate being pitched in blog posts, so I’ll relegate the commercial stuff to the end. I work at The Conversation Group – we consult on marketing strategy, and undertake research projects – in both cases with an emphasis on social technologies. Like all good consultants, our strategy is very much grounded in our research. If you think we can help you – with Twitter, or other social technologies, with strategy, or with research – drop me a line.
