I’ve taken over doing social media for a couple of organisations including a local choir. This choir has posted over 4,000 tweets and now has over 1,500 followers. I have a rough rule of thumb to follow half of those who follow us.

Is this translating into extra ticket sales and new choir members? It’s very hard to quantify this. I would say that only about 1 in 6 of the new followers we get are individuals rather than organisations. Some of these individuals are agents, musical promoters and others with a professional interest in what we do; others live overseas so are unlikely to join us or attend concerts. Does this matter?

I think it is less important than it seems:

• Behind every organisation who follows us there is a person or people possibly seeing our tweets
• The professionals may be useful to us at some point
• There are still enough interested individuals out there to make it worthwhile
• Retweets broadcast our information much more widely

Perhaps the real value is just in our presence, which tells the world we’re there and raises awareness of us.