Marketing with Mike Volpe

I am starting to take more of the questions I get by email, twitter and other means and post the responses here, exposing it to more than one person.  

Question by email:

I recently watched your Webinar on Marketing & PR for Twitter. It was very insightful and easy-to-understand (with great practical examples).  I wanted to know if you had any statistical data about how many followers the average business gains?  Basically, I wanted to know how many followers my business should have one month / six months / one year / etc. from now? 

My answer:

There is not a firm number.  Celebrities and consumer brands can amass hundreds of thousands of followers relatively quickly, while a B2B company making a specific technical product might max out at 1,000 or less.  More important than the raw number of followers is how targeted they are to your industry and how engaged they are with you and how strong the connection is.  You might also look at companies that are in similar spaces and see how many followers they have.  For instance with HubSpot, we're pretty happy that we have more followers than Salesforce.com, Omniture, and NetSuite - other B2B software companies in a similar space that are much bigger.

I can tell you is that companies that have a blog get 79% more followers on Twitter according to our research. Good content and being interesting is extremely important to social media and Twitter.