Your Tweet Has a Half Life of 5 minutes. Now What?

A recent study by Klout a company that provides a measure for how influential you are in your social media circles has announced that unless you have a higher Klout score, your tweet has a half life of about five minutes.

That is right, five minutes, so in essence, five minutes after you posted a tweet, people have stopped talking about it. That is not strictly what a half life is, but will suffice for our conversation.  Higher Klout scores above 80 can go on to have a half life of 5 hours or so but that is rareafied atmosphere in social media circles which most of us will never aspire to.

So what does this mean for our tweeting in real terms?
The results themselves are not suprising, there are 1000's of tweets rushing through my twitter feed every hour and there is no way I read them all.  I do check back on the accounts I have listed to catch any I know I don't want to miss but otherwise I can happily live with the missed tweets.

So as a social media marketer, besides getting an automated system and spamming your users every five minutes what can you do to ensure you get your message across.

Here are my top five tips
1. Content Content Content.  Content is no longer King, Good content is King, it doesnt matter how well you time your tweets, how many followers you have or how often you tweet, if you dont have content that is unique, useful, fun and engaging you are wasting your time.  Just having content is no longer enough, now you have to strive to have the best content.

2. Know when your audience is ready to be engaged.  Do you know when the majority of your twitter followers are online and on twitter? The Techandlife blog has a great graphic on time zones for tweeting, if your audience is Australian then life is easy, but if you are looking to engage an overseas audience, an automated system preprogramed with tweets will be the way to go.  The best way to find the right time to tweet? Experiment, try a morning, midday, afternoon and evening tweet, what respose are you getting.

3. Tweet frequently but not too frequently?  How do I do that I hear you ask. How often do you have good content to share? If you are like me I generally get out one good blog post per day. 1 tweet per day? That doesnt sound like a lot when people are advocating 4 tweets an hour.  Four tweets an hour will probably break through the clutter. Hubspot has some interesting graphics that show 22 tweets per day is a sweet spot, that isnt a lot when you think there is probably a lot of thank yous, retweets and replies.

4. Build Networks: Your tweets will live longer when they are retweeted into other peoples networks. Want someone to notice you? The best way to build networks is to engage, forget automated systems and do it the old fashioned way Follow, List and Retweet their content, start a conversation with them, thank them for their contributions, flattery will get you everywhere. Hopefully they will then return the favour and retweet your content.

5. Know what response you want.  It sounds silly but always keep in mind what you want from your twitter life.  Do you want retweets, replies, blog comments, facebook visits/likes, website visits, competition entries, or sales?  Knowing what you want makes it a hell of a lot easier to know if you have been sucessful.