Marketing Vox has reported that famous people with big followings on Twitter recently promoted a book, but as a result only produced a handful of sales.

Between them, two of these three people had nearly 3 million followers and got only one sale, but the third with under 5000 followers got more (although not many).  Indeed the report from Nieman Journalism Labs says that when actress Alyssa Milano (1.2 million followers) tweeted about the book sales actually went down!

But according to Nicholas Christakis, a professor at Harvard Medical School Faculty of Arts and Sciences spreading a conversation is not the same as affecting it. “I’m not saying that Twitter is useless but I think that the ability of Twitter to disseminate information is different than its ability to influence behaviour.”

It seems the point about Twitter is not the high number of followers, but instead their ability to get their followers to act.

And your ability to make your Twitter followers act relates to the way the articles on Twitter, and the links that lead to other articles, are written.   In essence once again it is all down to the copy.

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Tony Attwood