Past advice can be dangerous in digital marketing. What was effective even a day ago can suddenly become ineffective or counterproductive overnight.
Why do things turn on a dime in digital marketing? Unlike human-based mental algorithms, machine algorithms change in a nanosecond and the change is absolute. Humans take a while to accept a new truth, such as the Earth being round or the planets revolving around the sun.
As marketers, when we find a tactic that works on humans, we know we’ve got some time before that tactic decays in effectiveness. For example, the lost sheep email marketing tactic – “can you point me to the right person that handles X in your organization” – is still moderately effective.
When a machine changes its algorithm, however, we lack the luxury of time. We must adapt to the new reality immediately. When Facebook changes its News Feed, when Google changes its search algorithm, we must change as quickly and completely as the machines do – and never go back to our old ways.
Twitter announced a new algorithm – opt-in for now – in which more popular or relevant tweets will appear in our timelines first. This differs from the chronological order shown now. What does this mean for past advice about our Twitter strategy, tactics, and execution?
Conventional wisdom says to tweet the same content over and over again to take advantage of the different times of day our audiences participate. Some popular social media consultants suggest repeating the same tweets every 8 hours.
When social networks use algorithms to decide what content we should see first, they base the set of metrics they use in their algorithms on engagement. Facebook tracks how many people click on a link in our posts, how many people like, comment, and share.
What might Twitter’s new algorithm use to make similar calculations? We don’t need to guess; Twitter tells us in their Twitter Analytics dashboard:
Twitter pays attention to – and wants US to pay attention to – link clicks, retweets, likes, and replies. These four actions make up Twitter’s engagement formula.
The strategy and tactic of putting your content on endless re-runs worked fine in a chronological timeline world. When the new stuff shows up first, the more new stuff we publish, the better we do.
The repetition strategy breaks in an engagement-optimized world. We are better off publishing one tweet about our blog post which garners 5 Likes on Twitter than publishing 5 tweets about our blog post which garner 1 Like each. We must concentrate engagement.
If you want to make the most of Twitter’s new algorithm, grow engagement on every tweet. Ask followers to share, to like, to respond to you. Create content worthy of engagement. If you’re unsure what drives Twitter’s four engagement metrics, I recommend watching this short video about how to use IBM Watson Analytics with social media data.
Twitter’s new algorithm favors engagement. Disregard old advice about repeating yourself often if you want the new algorithm to work for you, not against you.
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