The Digital Domain
By Ron Matejko
About Ron
Ron Matejko is the President of Phoenix, Ariz.-based MVP Media, an award-winning digital publishing company. Matejko has 16 years of publishing experience in print, Web and mobile and has worked on the staff of two award-winning publications.
MVP Media publishes MVP Magazine, the first interactive sports publication, which won a Bronze 2010 Digital Magazine Award for Best Sports Magazine, besting entrants from 26 countries around the world, and was a finalist for Designer of the Year. MVP Media will launch its own magazines on the iPad in 2011.
MVP Media also helps existing publishers convert their print products into dynamic publications for the web and tablets. Visit the MVP Magazine website at www.mvptoday.com. Contact Ron by e-mail at ron@mvptoday.com, or connect with him on LinkedIn or on Twitter @mvp_media.
Profit from Publishing!
How will media convergence affect the production and distribution of news?
May 22, 2013I thought you all might be interested in this brief interview, conducted online by Jenna Batchelor, a student at Nottingham...
Pub Talk
Is Yahoo asking itself the right questions?
May 21, 2013After the news broke about Yahoo's acquisition of Tumblr, I paid a visit to Yahoo.Com (it has been quite a...
Publishers' Dojo
Like practically everything else in publishing, licensing content is changing
May 20, 2013I'm blogging from the Worldwide Media Marketplace (WMM), an annual event hosted by the FIPP, the worldwide magazine media association....
B2B Beat
ABM Annual Conference Greatest Hits
May 17, 2013Much has been written about ABM merging under the umbrella of SIIA. But much more was going on during the...
Media Vent
On Meredith Corp. Buying, Closing Parenting and Babytalk
May 17, 2013A wise friend in the know suggested to me that the new acquisition by Meredith of the Bonnier titles should...
The Digital Market
What do you think of the new mobile Google Play?
Apr 18, 2013A blog came out recently on the redesigned Google Play for mobile. It appears Michael Siliski, group product manager for...
The Postal Pundit
Climbing Out Of The Rubble Of Sandy
Dec 11, 2012The entire Eastern seaboard, but now mostly New York and New Jersey, has been struggling through the aftermath of Sandy,...
Everything Publishing
A New Way To Be a Player
Sep 19, 2011If you want to increase affinity with your brand, grow traffic (up to 20x for some sites) and retention, create...
Byte Back
What Is “Interactive” Anyway? (Part 2)
Feb 28, 2011The real question, it turns out, is less about embedded multimedia than it is about personalization, relevance and immediacy of...
Are Magazines Pitching Phantom Twitter Followers?
|
Magazine publishers have long used slight-of-hand techniques to boost their circulation numbers in an effort to demand higher advertising rates. As the digital and social worlds have exploded and become part of an overall multimedia ad purchase, as well as key to magazine marketing efforts, other numbers have also taken on added importance.
One of those media channels is Twitter. It is common now for magazines to communicate with its followers via Twitter, with some magazines boasting more than 1,000,000 followers. In fact, a recent L2 Digital IQ survey was released, identifying the magazines that are the most successful in branding and promoting their title across multiple digital platforms, including Twitter.
A few days later, a Business Insider story revealed that a lot of popular Twitter accounts actually have a lot of fake and inactive followers as determined by a new social media management platform called StatusPeople. It turns out that people like Lady Gaga, Kim Kardashian and many others who boast eight-figure totals, actually have much smaller followings with oftentimes only 30 percent of those followers being real.
With the L2 report still fresh in my mind, I decided to review the 19 magazines that have at least one million followers, and run them through StatusPeople to see how many real and active followers they have.
The numbers were staggering as the tests revealed that as few as 27 percent of a magazine’s followers are active and real. This doesn’t necessarily reveal any wrongdoing by the brands, although there are services that offer the ability to purchase bots and boost your follower total.
However, at the least, publishers should realize they are reaching a much smaller audience through their Twitter accounts—and brands who partner with those titles aren’t receiving as much exposure as expected if Twitter is part of the campaign.
The results of the StatusPeople test are in the photo box to the right (click on it to enlarge), or click here to view the chart in PDF format.
Sections:
 |
|
COMMENTS
Click here to leave a comment...
