Royal Pingdom reported that tweets increased by 16 times between January 2009 and January 2010, reaching more than 1.2 billion tweets. (http://mashable.com/2010/02/10/twitter-tweet-volume/) By January 2011, the number had increased to more than 3 billion tweets. Soon thereafter, the huge numbers led to a transition from counting tweets per month to tweets per day. Numbers vary a bit depending on who is reporting them, but Twitter itself reported 200 million tweets per day in June 2011 and then 250 million per day only 4 months later in October 2011. (http://mashable.com/2011/10/17/twitter-costolo-stats/) In the fall of 2011, Twitter also issued stats saying that it had more than 100 million users in the US alone and that more than 50% of these people were daily Twitter users. (http://www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/twitter-statistics-2012_b18914)
Regardless of whose numbers you use or how you slice and dice them, TWITTER IS HUGE!
All of your customers are there. The tool is pretty easy to use. It's free. And everyone who has anything to do with marketing has been telling you for at least a year now that you MUST do Twitter. (Never mind that it is often unclear what exactly you are supposed to do with it. Just do something - anything - now - Fast! :-))
Many businesses are using Twitter effectively to keep in touch with customers. Regular tweets, if read, are a great way to get quick information to your customers even just to make sure they are thinking about you regularly.
But the key part of the statement above is the "if read" part. As Twitter volume grows at a staggering pace, is it becoming less useful for reaching your customers? On the one hand, more customers are using Twitter regularly, greater than 50% of users checking in at least daily. They are also following more people/businesses which makes it easier to get on people's follow lists. But the challenge is being heard amongst the increasing volume of tweets. Not too long ago, if you tweeted something at the beginning of the day, your tweet would be seen by customers who checked Twitter at least until lunchtime or maybe even the entire day. The window of when you needed to tweet to be heard was open for hours. Because of the increased volume of tweets, they can scroll off people's screens in a matter of minutes. Today, getting tweets on customers’ screens is more like trying to fire a paper airplane into a window that is opening and closing constantly.
So, what should a business to do with Twitter? Every time a new marketing tool comes along and takes off, there is inevitably that stage where the masses, who are a little late, rush to it. They often do so because they feel like they have to with no real consideration for why or what to use it for. I have read countless articles about business use of Twitter recently. Many talk about things like frequency, consistency, schedules and all of these volume-type ways to make sure you are doing the right thing. If you post on a strategically devised schedule, you can catch many of your customers, even if they are on different Twitter schedules. This scheduling approach to communicating with customers drives the need to say something regardless of if it is useful. The emphasis on this strategy is making sure you get your tweets on people's screens.
At the point where you start doing Twitter posts because it is time to do a Twitter post with no regard for whether you have something interesting or useful to say you are on the path to becoming useless noise. Such noise is either subconsciously (just ignore like the ads on web pages) or consciously (stop following) being screened out. On the surface, Twitter is a new, cool whiz-bang technology. But at its core, it is a marketing tool. The key to marketing is to be interesting, useful or otherwise worthy of a customer’s attention. If you repeatedly post "because it was time to post" quality content, you will become part of the noise and get lost in it.
In the midst of figuring out the scheduling window issue, it is incredibly important not to lose track of the simple importance of communicating with customers in a way that is interesting, useful or otherwise valuable to them.
For a quick heads up when a new blog is posted, please follow us on Twitter at miPlaces.
Matt Karash (VP, Sales and Marketing @ Social eMotion) mkarash@social-emotion.com
No comments:
Post a Comment