Twitter is a social networking site that has gained a lot of traction since its introduction in 2006. It is often described as the short message service of the internet, characterized by its short 140-character messages that users can post called tweets. Non-users also have the ability to see content that is posted, but do not have the ability to post anything.Currently there are about 310 million active monthly Twitter users according to the company's website. 79% of these users are outside of the United States and the site supports over 40 languages. Having a presence on Twitter is all about gaining followers, more followers mean that more people are seeing your tweets and allows them to retweet your tweet to their followers or respond to your tweet. Another unique feature that originated on Twitter is hashtags, these are essentially groupings of tweets. Hashtags allow people to highlight keywords in their tweets, which then makes the tweet searchable on Twitter.
Businesses can use Twitter in order to reach a younger crowd of customers with 41% of Twitter users being between the ages of 18 and 34, as of December 2014. Young people often use Twitter as a quick way to gather news and other information about companies. Because tweets are so short they are able to consume a lot of tweets with just one visit to the site. Twitter is also a way for businesses to show their brand identity and who they really are as a company. This can be done by retweeting relevant industry information or retweeting funny or interesting news stories or topics. Twitter can also be used to entice customers to visit your company website. This can be done through special Twitter only exclusives, sales, or sneak peeks at new products. The more company's post on twitter and are retweeted the more they expand their search engine optimization.
Key benefits of using Twitter include:
- Increase brand awareness and monitor brand reputation
- Promotion of other marketing and outreach efforts including blog posts and videos
- Instant feedback about your company and products
- Gather competitive information
- Gather information about your followers to better serve their needs
One way that Twitter helps businesses learn about their followers is through their Twitter analytics. The goal of Twitter analytics is to help business understand how their content is growing their business. Twitter analytics allows business to see the following information:
- View top performing tweets
- Metrics on each tweet posted including number of likes, retweets, and replies
- Follower growth information
- Follower demographic and interest information
- Track impressions, results, and cost-per-result of ad campaigns
- Online conversation tracking
- Ability to quickly promote tweets that have been posted in order to reach more people
Overall, I think that a company's best of use of Twitter is to increase brand awareness and engage with customers. I personally know that I have never purchased anything from a link in a company's tweet. As one of the individuals who falls into the young user base, I find Twitter to be a great resource for news and keeping up to date on what my favorite celebrities and companies are doing. A list of trending hashtags always shows up on your homepage and this is yet another way that business can reach new/existing customers because they can pay to be a promoted hashtag. Twitter offers a lot of different analytical and marketing services to businesses. The way a business uses them all depends on how much they are willing to spend and how much time they are willing to invest to understand their followers and provide content that is fun and exciting.
Sources:
http://www.businessinsider.com/update-a-breakdown-of-the-demographics-for-each-of-the-different-social-networks-2015-6
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter
https://business.twitter.com/en.html
http://www.aismedia.com/top-10-ways-business-can-benefit-from-using-twitter-infographic/
https://www.statista.com/chart/2058/reasons-to-use-twitter-as-a-marketing-tool/
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