100,000 Twitter followers of @DowningStreet due to auto-opt-in when Account is Created
The Downing Street Twitter Feed has gone over 100,000 followers (i.e., readers) some time in the last few days. Here is a graph from Twittercounter.
That’s a lot, and an achievement not to be underestimated. It has been noted by a number of sites. The excellent Simon Dickson at Puffbox suggests that this is active interest in politics:
Even if there’s no future business model, we’re looking at a phenomenal opportunity here, today. The fact it may not be here tomorrow shouldn’t stop us exploiting it while it’s there. 100,000 people have signed up – actively, voluntarily – to hear from the heart of UK government. Now they’re actually listening, what should we be saying to them?
I’m an enthusiast (and a “booster“) for political participation, and I’m with Simon on “let’s use this opportunity”. But unfortunately the interest isn’t quite as “active” as he thinks, since a signup to the 10 Downing Street Twitter Feed is now part of the account creation process on Twitter. And it is even set as an “opt-in” option.
Looking at the graph at the top of the article, I’d speculate that the default 10 Downing Street feed was added to the Twitter signup process around 11th February when the follower growth jumped from roughly 1000 each day to around 7000-8000.
I’d even speculate that the first increase in the rate of new people following @downingstreet around 14 Jan was when the new feeds were added to the signup process, and the second increase was when they were made “opt-in”.
I can’t judge whether they are only included in the sign-up process in the UK.
I’m with Simon that the press team web team at No 10 deserve a lot of credit for getting onto Twitter relatively early and using it interactively rather than just as another syndication method. And I’m also glad that a political news feed if being embedded so firmly into the online dialogue – that must be a good thing and phenomenal opportunity is the right phrase to use.
Politically, if I was the opposition (or the government, or Mark Pack) I’d be taking a careful look at how that feed is being used, since it has a reach arguably greater than anything else online coming out of Downing Street.
As a further proof of the hypothesis, if you look at a graph comparing @downingstreet with @jodrellbank and @coldplay, two of the other “opt-in on signup” accounts, you see exactly the same pattern:
Sorry guys, but we’re not in a new political age yet.
But let’s get back to positives – just *how* can that feed be used to increase interest in politics.
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Cracking piece of work. Well done.
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Good spot. We can argue about the semantics – by not opting out, are they actively opting in? – but I think the point still stands. That’s a lot of people signing up to your contact list, no matter what process led them to do so.
In fact, having worked at Microsoft for a while, I know how much value there is in being among those lucky few services offered at signup… and how fiercely people lobby, even internally, to be in that select group. (For the record, I believe No10 were chosen on merit; I don’t think they did anything to request it.)
Don’t give the ‘press team’ too much credit, though; the initiative came from the web team, which is – physically and philosophically! – a separate entity. I’m not sure the press side takes much of an interest; and on balance, it’s probably just as well. It’s civil servants doing the tweeting – and they do a fine job treading the fine line between ‘government’ and ‘politics’.
[Comment largely cross-posted from Poliblog Perspective]
>Good spot. We can argue about the semantics – by not opting out, are they actively opting in? – but I think the point still stands. That’s a lot of people signing up to your contact list, no matter what process led them to do so.
Yep. How long will it take a blogger to get to 100k?
>In fact, having worked at Microsoft for a while, I know how much value there is in being among those lucky few services offered at signup… and how fiercely people lobby, even internally, to be in that select group. (For the record, I believe No10 were chosen on merit; I don’t think they did anything to request it.)
I think it highlights some limitations of online politics. It is far more permeable than “offline politics” (I went from inventing a name to here in well under 2 years – leaving it up to others to judge just how far “here” is), but it is still easy for “kingmakers” to drive things to prominence *very* quickly.
>Don’t give the ‘press team’ too much credit, though; the initiative came from the web team, which is – physically and philosophically! – a separate entity. I’m not sure the press side takes much of an interest; and on balance, it’s probably just as well. It’s civil servants doing the tweeting – and they do a fine job treading the fine line between ‘government’ and ‘politics’.
Edited.
Matt
>In fact, having worked at Microsoft for a while, I know how much value there is in being among those lucky few services offered at signup… and how fiercely people lobby, even internally, to be in that select group.
I’m tempted to draw an analogy with low numbers in the Sky EPG.
>(For the record, I believe No10 were chosen on merit; I don’t think they did anything to request it.)
I’d expect them to have been in as one of the early prominent governments.
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Hi Matt. Interesting post and you are probably correct about the interest not being as “active” as it might appear.
Just in case you’re interested, I setup the Jodrell Bank twitter feed in 2007. Back then we were featured on the front page of Twitter for a short while. I assumed this was because, at that time, we stood out amongst the much smaller user base. I got a shock in January when our follower numbers started increasing so suddenly; I had to turn off the email notifications of new users as my email started to get swamped.
I appreciate that many of our new followers have not really opted in. That said, we’ve been able to share some of the wonders of the night (and daytime) skies with plenty of interested people that probably wouldn’t go to our Visitor Centre or listen to our podcasts.
Clear skies.
Stuart
What a fantastic comment. Thanks.
I’m fascinated by all of this. I went on Twitter a year ago (there’s a bit of the old style geek about me sometimes
, and the sudden and rapid wider take-up now has surprised everyone.
It’s excellent that JB has so many followers.
One of things that interests me is the click-through rate for opt-in vs opted-in at sign-up feeds (and for read-only “headline” feeds vs those used for conversation. I’m getting numbers up to 8-10% on my own feed (just 1000 followers or so).
Matt
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Matt, by click-through rate do you mean the number of unique IP addresses following a link that you post in your twitter feed? If so, my feeling (I need to sit down with our log files and do this properly sometime) is that the rate is smaller than yours.
On the topic of headline vs conversation, I’ve been very conscious of trying to tread a delicate line somewhere between both. It would be very easy to just have an automatic feed with self-publicising headlines but I don’t think that would be very useful. We’ve been trying to make sure that we do engage in conversations and answer questions where we can. Sometimes we don’t because it wouldn’t be appropriate (someone asked us for recommendations for a local B&B) or in cases where it is almost impossible to answer correctly within the character limit. I’ve discovered that it is not easy to give live observing directions to a global audience!
Clear skies.
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I’d expect your rate on the @jodrellbank feed to be lower since a lot of your people have come in as default, rather than because they are specifically interested (sorry!).
The best stats on “opted in by Twitter” or “news feeds with 50-100k+ followers” I have is that for those feeds 0.5->1% might be closer than 2->10%, although I’d suggest that the objective of building a community would help.
The theoretical definition of click-through rate would be:
“number of people clicking on the link divided by number of people who see the link.”
In practice this gets messy, as you cannot count the number of people who see the link, as they go out to Twitter, Twitter Clients, Twitter Search Engines, Facebooks Statuses, other Social Networking Websites, Mobile Phone, Blog sidebars and any number of other places.
In practice I think that this is more useful:
“number of people clicking on the link divided by number of Twitter followers”
since that gives an indication of the “quality” of the Tweet by being higher when it is Retweeted etc. In theory that number could be way over 100%.
Within that you can usually get an idea of sources of clicks (Twitter website, clients, Facebook etc) from the referrer string.
I put a tip on Twexpert about one way of getting the stats for individual Tweets:
http://bit.ly/CmeI3
Matt