Learning twitter from the masters

I'd moved on to answering emails, when Chris Addison's voice came on the headphones.  Beyond enjoying the familiar dulcet tones, I wasn't really thinking about it until I heard him say, 'School careers advice is rubbish, and university careers advice is worse'.  Now being in the business of supporting careers advisers, this got me interested.

It turned out that Chris (maybe?) wasn't being too hard on careers advisers, just on being given advice on your career.  And be nice.  Always a good message, for students, or anyone, so I went away and tweeted it.

The next morning I noticed we'd been retweeted a few times, so I checked out the analytics - there's some good free stuff about and checking it is a bit of a habit now.  There it was, a whopping big peak, with over 30,000 'impressions' after an @MrChrisAddison retweet.  Good news for our stats!

First of all I was thinking a slightly defensive 'What's Chris doing so well that we're not', and then a more analytic, 'How's a comedian's getting more tweet impressions than our Careers Department?'.  I know, you're thinking Stephen Fry, Mr. Twitter, 10 million followers.  So what can we learn from them?  Is it anything we can do to improve our reach?  As it turns out there was quite a bit we could do, and possibly led to improvements in our 'impressions', 'engagements' and followers, and hopefully guided a few more students to employers and employers to students.

So, first off, looking at the analytics - try Tweetstats.com - I found out you can lurk on tweets and twitter stats.  It turns out Chris sends out as many tweets as Careers Network (10 a day).  There's also virtually no pattern to when he sends tweets - a bit of a dip on Tuesdays, but not much else to see.  A look at the tweets and I think it's pretty clear he's not using 'scheduling'.  Stephen Fry sends about 10 a day too - again, no pattern to tweets, no scheduling.  I can't test this, but from what they write I'm guessing they both read a lot of tweets too, even if they don't retweet or favourite a lot.

They also give an opinion (mostly polite), and to be honest, a lot of what they tweet must make little sense to most of their followers - it's directed at particular people, be it #bbcqt, or the magic circle.  It's also very of the moment - it dates, often within minutes.  Even though they are accomplished comedians, it's playful, but actually it's not often funny (sorry guys).  They do manage to promote things important to them, and yes, it always says a lot about them as people - it's personal.

And they are always nice - any chance of a retweet guys?