For the Men’s Health brand, Twitter represents the perfect medium to connect with new and existing readers. It allows for readers to get direct, real-time updates from the magazine, and provides followers with news, pictures, and tips beyond what they find in the magazine and on the website. Twitter allows us to assess what our readers want and to give it to them. And beyond that—we are able to talk with—and not just at—our readers so that we can provide them with the best information pertaining to health, nutrition, and fitness. @MensHealthMag is not just a copy-and-paste Twitter account—we don’t just take a headline, shorten a link and push it to our followers. When we do link to our site, we are clear about what the user will be reading on the other end. Beyond magazine content, we also post tips, facts, motivational quotes, and stats of interest. Numbers don’t lie. While follower counts are a superficial metric, they’re also extremely important. Here’s how our numbers have spiked in the last year: • @MensHealthMag gained an average of 35,300 followers each month for the last year, increasing from 238K (1/31/11) to 662K (1/31/12)—a growth of 178%. • @MensHealthMag added nearly 60,000 followers in January of this year, 70% above the average acquisition rate from 2011. • Unique monthly visitors from posted tweets increased from 64K (1/31/11) to 501K (1/31/12) a growth of 682%; monthly page views increased from 854K to 4.4MM, a growth of 414%—so the rate at which unique visitors increased is much larger than the rate at which our followers did. What does that mean? It means our focus on quality content and conversations paid dividends in the long run. Beyond those baseline metrics, we’re constantly using new ways to connect with our followers and to reach even more users. Take hashtags, for example. We frequently create fun hashtags to get people talking about the topics that are relevant to our brand. Some examples: #shesakeeper, #newyearnewme, #datingrules, #ReTweetThisIf, and #gympetpeeve (which we made a worldwide trending topic on December 14). We also have over 11K followers on Instagram and regularly share photos. Some are behind the scenes, others are motivational tidbits and still others are special shots of the magazine to drive readership of our strongest content. We also love to include reader feedback from Twitter on our site, showing our followers we value their opinion and want to hear what they think. To us, that’s what it’s really all about.
http://www.menshealth.com/best-life/new-year-new-you-social -#newyearnewme MH initiative http://news.menshealth.com/v-day-gifts-no-man-should-buy/2012/02/13/ http://news.menshealth.com/the-most-obnoxious-thing-you-do-at-the-gym/2011/12/20/ -Example of eader feedback from Twitter included on our site https://twitter.com/#!/MensHealthMag/status/168205172357607425 -This tweet had a high level of sharing (504 RTs) and is a self-contained tip for readers, without expecting them to click through to the site https://twitter.com/#!/MensHealthMag/status/166376833510678528 -An example of rallying users around a hashtag. This particular tweet garnered 1,397 RTs https://twitter.com/#!/GraemeWilde/status/170536999172841473 -Example of fan showing appreciation for the brand https://twitter.com/#!/m_ritger/status/170196447550115840 -example of how we’re able to think about what our readers want and give it to them via Twitter and other social media platforms https://twitter.com/#!/MensHealthMag/status/167768528982781952 -Motivational quote example. This tweet was RT’d 487 times. https://twitter.com/#!/MensHealthMag/status/168879587269414913 -Interesting, shareable factoid. This had 308 RTs.
