Micropsychographics: Twitter Types And Retweeting

I had dinner with Alistair Kroll last night, and we fell into a discussion of the inevitability of Twitter being overrun with corporate marketing folks, eager to have the twitterati clicking on and retweeting various URLs they would be embedding in their corporate twitter streams. For the purpose of this discussion, I will refer to all tweets with a URL as URled (pronounced ‘urled’ not ‘you-are-elled’).

Alistair proposed some scheme that was based on a/ features that don’t exist in Twitter, and b/ the goal of optimizing Twitter campaigns: getting maximum return.

I offered a few suggestions, which he thought I should write up.

I have noticed very different responses to different styles of URled tweets. And I think it has to do with the psychological makeup of the recipients of the messages, just as much as the text in the message.

Some people, perhaps the more analytical sorts, seem to respond well to simple declarative statements, or text that reads like the title of a blog post, such as the title of a blog post, like this:

Micropsychographics: Twitter Types And Retweeting - http://bit.ly/x341U

Others like questions:

Does personality play a big role in URL clicking in Twitter? http://bit.ly/x341U

Others seem to respond to anger:

I am incensed that marketers use my personality like a tool http://bit.ly/x341U

And some like direct appeals:

Please RT!! Personality and clicking in Twitter!! http://bit.ly/x341U

So, I suggested to Alistair that companies might wise up to this, and instead to sending one message to everyone, they could keep track of what sort of messages worked with specific people, and then send them the sort of message that seems to lead them to click through and/or retweet.

This would require some tool that manages this information — some sort of Cotweet-ish corporate twittering machinery — and the ability to send direct messages to followers who are — in principle — interested in the company’s bacon. It would also require the ability to generate a collection of shortened URLs, all pointing to the same long URL, and the ability to easily track results across the set, with the goal of discovering the micropsychographic groups latent in the company’s followers.

Now a few caveats: I am not a marketer, really, nor a psychologist. This theory is based on my own unscientific observations, and should be considered anecdotal evidence at best. But I think there is a germ of truch in here, and so I expect that micropsychographics will emerge in the next few years as an element of micromarketing.