How Far Do Tweets Go?

You may wonder sometimes how many people are seeing your tweets. Now there is a free service from Tweet Reach that can give you an idea of the potential audience of your messages. When entering your own @Name at the site, it gives you an indication of just how far your tweet is flowing out in the Twitterverse and who is helping the most in spreading the message.

The free version of Tweet Reach looks at the last 50 messages sent to determine the potential audience seeing a search term. Users can enter names, hashtags, or any string of interest to get an idea of how many people may see the message. The information is dynamic over time and the results depend on who is messaging you at the time. It’s a good place to start in understanding how an account works.

Here are some recent views of my account. I have had exposures to greater than 6,000,000 twitter users at certain times:

Another nice feature of Tweet Reach is that it shows the contribution of single messages and that of the different number of multiple retweets. As the graph below indicates, sending a message to your stream will count as 1 impression, but when it gets resent or retweeted, the overall number of people getting a message increases dramatically. Shown below on the page are the users which have increased the exposure and the number of additional impressions as a result of forwarding or retweeting a message. The effect of retweets on message exposure is so interesting that it will be the subject of a future blog post.

Tweet Reach also calculates the number of exposures versus the number of impressions of a message. As users can have common followers, a single message may make it multiple times to a receiver that follows both of the message senders as the picture below shows:

In building recognition exposure for an account, it is useful to find new people so that they can see the account name. However, the more times a receiver sees your name the more likely they will recognize it, building the value of the brand of your name. Like anything else in life, spreading your name is something to do in moderation, but if you never tweet, no one will know you.

Like anything else Twitter, exposures and impressions are not an exact science, Rather this tool provides insight into what messages and who is contributing to your message exposures. Twitter is introducing their own web analytic service that is in beta testing in September of 2011 that will provide insight to the message exposure of tweets.

In conclusion, this finally answers the question: “If a tweet is sent alone in the woods, will anybody see it?”. The answer is yes.