[RESULTS] Auto welcome DM affecting follow-back ratio? — my experiment

GwenGwen

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A couple weeks ago, I started an experiment: Is it a bad idea to send automatic welcome direct messages to new Twitter followers?

Everyone finds this irritating (including me) and people rarely recommend this technique. But I suspected most people would ignore the DM and very few people would be annoyed enough to ?cancel? their follow.

As a marketer, I?m looking for conversion, and I wanted to know if it was effective.

My original data is here. (I wanted to edit the original post, but I couldn?t. And I think the info here is valuable enough to create a new post).


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MY QUESTIONS
1? Will my follow-back ratio drop because people hate getting auto DMs?
2? Will it increase my like ratio because it actually works?


WHAT I DID
I sent an automatic welcome message thanking people for the follow and gently asking them to like my Facebook page. Every other variable remained unchanged.

The message wasn?t sent to all my new followers, only a fraction of them (only ~130 per day, because I didn?t want to get banned for sending too many DMs)


THE RESULTS
The experiment lasted 24 days. I excluded data from the Christmas holidays, for obvious reasons.

During the experiment, I gained a total of 2610 Twitter followers and 100 Facebook fans/likes.

Automatic DMs sent to new Twitter followers
BEFORE = 0
NOW (daily average) = 133.9
NOW (total for my experiment) = 3214

Twitter growth (daily average of new followers)
BEFORE: 104.09
NOW: 108.75

Twitter follow-back ratio (daily average)
BEFORE: 21.04%
NOW: 22.57%

Facebook net likes growth
BEFORE (daily): 2.01 *Different from my original post because I recalculated the data
NOW (daily average): 4.17


THE ANSWERS

1 - Was my follow-back ratio affected by the fact that I sent automatic welcome messages? Not at all.

2 - Most importantly: did this technique help me achieve my goal (get more Facebook likes): Yes, but not massively.

3 - Sending 3214 DMs to get 100 Facebook likes in 24 days? that?s an average conversion rate of 3.11%. Not especially high.

Conclusion: It worked for me, with this specific account/context/audience/niche. I'll try to tweak this technique to increase the conversion rate.

Fun fact: only one person replied to my DM with negative feedback. And I often get positive replies from people saying ?Great content. Thanks!? or ?Ok, I?ll like your page? or ?Hey, check out my Facebook page too!?
 
Oh, and feel free to double-check my calculations. I hope I haven't made any mistakes.

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Edit: I just realized something when re-reviewing these numbers. I said that I didn't send a DM to every new follower, but that may be false. The reason: I'm sending an average of 133.9 messages/day (those people can't be old followers) while "only" growing my account to an average of 108.75 followers/day. So it's entirely possible that these 133 messages represent the pure number of new followers. And then 25 people actually unfollow me during the day, giving a NET GAIN of 108.

Of course, there are tools to help me calculate this, but I don't think I'll bother investing time in this part because none of this changes the conclusions of the experiment ;)
 
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So you send DM asking your followers to like your FB fanpage?
 
Great thread. Would love to see more threads like that one.
 
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