The Secret Reach of Your Twitter Replies, Plus All Our Latest Stats and Strategies on Social Media

Sometimes looking through your social media statistics can reveal some fun surprises.

This was the case for us this month at Buffer.

I looked a little closer into the stats from all of our tweets, including all the amazing replies by our support heroes. There’s some amazing hidden virality to these tweets! And there’s a great opportunity here to delight your customers and further your brand’s reach at the same time.

Continue reading to see how this played out for us recently, along with all of last month’s social media stats (and some fun ideas for the future.)

Inside Buffer’s social media marketing stats

Here’re our complete stats from April for each of Buffer’s four major social media profiles. We’re hopeful that the context and background is helpful as you build and analyze your social media strategies. Feel free to shout with any questions!

(All stats are from the past 28 days, and comparisons are made to the 28 days prior.)

Twitter

We gained 11,532 new followers for a total of 313,219 followers. (Last month, we gained 15,288 new followers.)

We shared 384 tweets (not including #bufferchat and customer happiness) that earned a total of 72,631 total interactions. This was an increase of about 31 interactions per tweet compared to last month.

Out of everyone who saw a tweet, 1.4 percent of users engaged with the tweet by clicking, retweeting, replying, favoriting, or following the Buffer account.

• Engagement rate – 1.4% (2.0% last month)
• Average impressions per tweet – 16,046 (12,604 last month)
• Average total engagement per tweet – 239 (clicks, retweets, replies, follows, and favorites) (291 last month)
• Average clicks per tweet – 148 (121 last month)
• Average retweets per tweet – 23 (26 last month)

If you’re interested in digging deeper into any of these stats, I’m happy to share our .csv of exported Twitter analytics.

Facebook

We gained 835 new page Likes for a total of 35,908 Likes. (We gained 829 new page Likes last month.)

We shared 63 posts that earned 4,866 interactions. This was an increase of 12 interactions per post compared to last month.

An average Facebook post reached 1,549 (1,825 last month). Of these, 1,030 people were fans of our page (1,134 last month), so each post reached an average of 2.8 percent of our total number of fans (was 3.2 percent last month).

• Average clicks per post – 62 (+11 from last month)
• Average likes per post – 10 (no change from last month)
• Average comments per post – 1 (no change from last month)

If you’re interested in digging deeper into any of these stats, I’m happy to share our .csv of exported Facebook analytics.

LinkedIn

We gained 283 new followers for a total of 4,742 followers. (We gained 399 new followers last month.)

We shared 28 posts that earned a total of 207 interactions.

• Engagement rate – 1.8%
• Interactions per post – 7 (-3 from last month)

Google+

We gained 34,644 new followers for a total of 776,788 followers. (We gained 43,211 new followers last month.)

We shared 37 posts that earned a total of 957 interactions.

• Interactions per post – 25 (24 last month)
• Clicks per post – 3 (6 last month)
• Reshares per post – 4 (same)
• Plus Ones per post – 17 (13 last month)

Referral traffic to the Buffer blog

The above chart shows the top six social referrers to the Buffer Social blog. Not pictured: Scoop.it, StumbleUpon, Tumblr, and reddit.

Referral traffic to the Buffer app

The above chart shows the social referrer traffic to the Buffer app itself. We had a small period of transition with our Google Analytics as we moved from bufferapp.com to buffer.com, so the monthly comparisons aren’t reflected here.

The one big difference (and I’ll mention it below also) is that Pinterest moved to our No. 4 referrer after being outside the top 10 in previous months.

Inside Buffer’s social media strategies

Along with the stats, I’d love to share a bit about the strategies we’re testing on different social networks. It’d be awesome if you find this helpful or if this sparks any ideas for you. And it’d be great to get your thoughts in the comments on ways we could improve or grow, too!

1. The hidden value of engaging with your audience on Twitter

We’re fortunate as social media managers to have amazing customer happiness teammates who jump in to offer support on Twitter. (Handling support and marketing in this way is one of our best time-saving tips, too.)

Our @buffer mentions on Twitter go through SparkCentral, our Twitter support tool, where any teammate can hop in and reply.

These replies are hugely vital, whether it’s a team of people working on them or if it’s a one-person team replying and tweeting everything. Engaging in this way is great for building brand loyalty, practicing social listening, and helping others.

And there’s even a bit of viral reach to these messages.

Looking at our Twitter stats for the month, I was delighted to see that these replies gained impressions (some in the thousands!), engagement, and retweets—just as if we had been sharing a Buffer blog post.

This tweet reply from Courtney was seen 5,000 times (thanks to a retweet from Lana Layne to her 43,000 followers).

This tweet reply from Mary was seen nearly 1,000 times and received 30 interactions, including 18 clicks, three favorites, and one retweet.

Takeaway: There’s great value in replying in a kind and delightful way on Twitter. Your replies can earn engagement and reach just like any other tweet!

2. A boost in traffic from Pinterest

We’ve put more time and energy into our Pinterest strategy—sharing 5 times per day, or more, to Pinterest—and it’s seemed to result in more traffic back to the blog and to Buffer.

Here’s the chart for referral traffic to the blog from Pinterest:

Here’s the chart for referral traffic to Buffer:

The traffic to Buffer correlates with the announcement of Buffer and Pinterest integration. We got a nice mention on Pinterest’s blog post on April 27, and we’ve seen spikes in traffic since.

Some of the traffic may also be related to increased pinning. Certainly, the majority of gains from Pinterest referral traffic to the blog has been due to our increased focus on Pinterest marketing.

We’ve tried several new ways to be helpful to our audience on Pinterest. Here are the ones that have worked best for us:

1. Pin consistently at least 5x per day
2. Schedule your Pins
3. Apply for Rich Pins for your website or blog
4. Create “Pin It for Later” links
5. Design images at the proper size
6. Create and Pin images with text
7. Write keyword-rich descriptions and boards
8. Add a link to your pin descriptions

New visions and ideas for social media marketing

We feel grateful for the chance to work on so many amazing and fun social media strategies, and we’ve got even more that we’d love to try out. Here are a few that we’re thinking over.

1. Social media education courses

We’ve had this idea for free 7-day social media courses, a way to repurpose content from the blog into a helpful series of emails you can subscribe to.

Does that sound like something you’d be at all interested in?

Repurposing content is one that has come up for us often with our Buffer blog posts. Could we be making SlideShares or ebooks, etc. with all the content we’ve produced here? Email courses seem like a potentially quite exciting route, especially when it comes to helping others learn about social media marketing.

Here are some potential courses we’ve thought about offering:

1. Social Media 101
2. Twitter Tips for Beginners
3. Advanced Twitter Tips
4. How to Get Your Posts Seen on Facebook
5. Introduction to HTML/CSS

2. Our complete list of ideas and brainstorms

We’ve been maintaining a list of marketing experiments that we’d love to try. Do any of these feel like they’d be useful for you to learn along with us?

A couple of the standout ones here for me are the Twitter office hours and Hangout on Air office hours.

Basically, these could be some times each week where the community gathers to chat about social media marketing tips. We could share a bit about what we’ve been learning and trying, and the community can ask questions and chime in with all your great learnings as well.

A Twitter chat would be a real-time, text-only get-together (like #bufferchat). The Hangout on Air would be a live video chat that we could save and share later as a YouTube video.

Lots of cool options here!

Social media content we’d love to write about (any thoughts?)

And finally, I’d love to share a few of the social media blog post ideas we’re considering for the next few weeks. If any of these topics jump out at you, I’d love to hear your votes!

1. The Best Typography, Colors, and Templates Used in the Highest-Converting Social Media Images
2. The Ultimate Style Guide for Social Media Marketing
3. How to Do Pinterest SEO: The Hidden Keys to Creating Pins That Are Easily Found, Forever
4. Beginner’s Guide to Quora: The Most Helpful Uses for Marketers
5. 13 New Social Media Templates to Save You Hours
6. How to Build a Massive Following on Instagram

Over to you

I hope this look into our Buffer social media stats and strategies holds some insights or ideas for you as you build out your own strategies. I’d love to expand on anything here—and hear from you on any thoughts that come up.

What are you working on this month on social media?

Do any stats or strategies stand out here for you?

It’d be amazing to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Image sources: IconFinder, Raumrot