250,000 Visitor Edinburgh Art Festival Leverages Twitter; Photos Boost Engagement

The Edinburgh Art Festival, the annual visual arts event which attracts over 250,000 visitors, opened last Thursday, and their Twitter feed has been ALIVE over the past week.

In the seven day period we tracked, which includes the first several days of the event, and a few days leading up to it, the event organizer posted to Twitter nearly 100 times, including both Tweets and retweets.

In addition to highlighting the volume here, one other key aspect of their Twitter promotion that is worth pointing out is that nearly 50% of their posts had photos.  We highlight this because photos can increase the number of people who retweet your posts, providing a nice no-cost social overlay, something you certainly want to maximize.

Consider these data points from the posts we analyzed… photo-posts on average had 60% more retweets than text-only posts.  To be fair, the opening day “event kick-off” post had the most retweets by far, and it was text-only.  However, when you remove this outlier from the analysis, the average retweet rate for photo-posts increases to more than 2x the text-only posts.

The increased retweet rate as a result of photos has been demonstrated at scale in various studies which have analyzed large numbers of Tweets.  The lift generated from photos varies among the studies but all show a material increase in engagement.

Twitter itself says adding photos results in an “impressive boost in the number of Retweets” based on a study it did, and published on its media blog several months ago.

Twitter looked at over two million Tweets sent by thousands of verified users across different fields over the course of a month, and says its analysis indicated “photos give verified users a 35% bump in retweets, compared to what they would get anyway.”

Check out the interactive chart below which nicely illustrates the effect of photos as well as other Twitter features on retweets, and how these numbers vary as you change the industry selection, which Twitter states is an important point to note.

BOTTOM LINE: Leverage photos in Tweets promoting your exhibitions and events and see how they affect your results but experiment with other Twitter features too, and optimize your Tweet content strategy based on what resonates best with your audience.

Posted on August 5, 2014