The Oracle Mix Blog

Over the last couple of years, our team has been involved in many discussions around micro-blogging, specifically Twitter, and how it can be put to good use in a corporate (mostly marketing) setting here at Oracle. Needless to say, Twitter has grown very popular with many groups and teams. New accounts are popping up left and right as more and more people are becoming familiar with the social web.

Here are a few numbers for the currently 13 official Twitter accounts (the list is growing by about 1-2 accounts per month).

1. Aggregate growth

2. Top number of "followers" (number of people following Oracle)

There has been steady growth in followers of about 5-8% per week.

oracle: 6,381
oraclemix: 1,802
oraclecrm: 1,686
oracletechnet: 1,115
oracleopenworld: 1,007

3. Top number of "following" (number of people Oracle follows)

oraclecrm: 2,000
oracleopenworld: 624
OracleRetail: 362
oraclemix: 320
oracletechnet: 304

4. Top number of tweets per week

These numbers are based on the ten-week time period May 18 through July 26, 2009.

oracletechnet: 32.9
oraclecrm : 25.6
OracleRetail: 22.8
oracleprofit: 20
oracle: 12.2

5. Top follower-to-following ratio

This ratio indicates the number of followers per every user that Oracle follows. For example, @oracle has more than 6,381 followers but only follows back 11 others (and only Oracle accounts).

oracle: 580.1
oracledatabase: 145.8
oraclemiddle: 60.3
oraclepartners: 57.6
oracleprofit: 14.7

For @oraclemix, our ratio is 5.6 which is a bit more balanced.

* * *

There are a lot more ways to look at Twitter usage (e.g. number of mentions, number of replies, number of re-tweets, number of click-throughs etc.) but we're not tracking these consistently across all acounts yet (it's still a lot of manual labor as we wait for the proper analytics tools to evolve and grow).

There are also a lot of qualitative aspects that we keep an eye on (e.g. tone, customer satisfaction etc.) that may at times be a lot more important than quantitative measures.

Which metrics are right for you depends on your goals, of course, and on the kind of presence you hope to establish on Twitter. You'll note that each of our Twitter channels has different characteristics to best meet the needs of their various audiences and communities.