We do not have statistics, but we suspect that the average Twitter corporate/business user follows a few hundred other Twitter users, and not necessarily out of interest. People follow others for a myriad of reasons: common courtesy (i.e. following back), to increase follower count (i.e. by making others obliged to follow you back), marketing reasons (i.e. to be on a potential customer’s radar), etc. In fact, we ourselves are guilty of using Twitterin the same way. Ergo, the Twitter Timeline is not a real aggregation of content shared by the people or companies in which we are truly interested. The possibly-enormous follower count that we have is a mere by-product of our other goals.

If that is the case, then the number of followers we have is inaccurate in reflecting how many impressions our Tweets get or how widely our message is spread, since engagement is likely to be very low. Impressions, after all, are only useful if people even read our message or click on our links. The fact is that, even if our customers solely follow people or companies in which they are interested, anyone following more than, say, 300 Twitter users would find her Timeline to be overwhelming and thus unappealing.

We propose a known yet frequently-overlooked way of marketing on Twitter: utilize the Mention tag (@) more often. There are several advantages of doing so. First, you are only competing for the attention of the user you mentioned with other users who used the Mention tag. Second, it adds a personal touch to your message, and your audience is likely to respond in some way. Third, it gives us the opportunity to be searched by our audience’s fans, customers, competitors, stakeholders, etc., which may very well lead to other benefits, e.g. partnership opportunities and new customers.

Mentioning specific people is undoubtedly less scalable, but, since it is a more targeted approach, the engagement rate is also likely to be higher overall. This hypothesis has been consistent with our experience using the Mention tag, at least on the receiving end. What has your experience been with the Mention tag?