When speaking about social networks, we can’t leave Twitter behind. After programmer Jack Dorsey twitted for the very first time: “Just setting my twttr,” back in 2006, Dorsey and his co-workers Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams, gave birth to a social network that would change communication, media, and social networking today. It is stated that other names like Dodgeball and Friendstalker were considered before going for Twitter.
Described in different dictionaries as the act of twittering, a short burst of inconsequential information, or to talk rapidly and tremulously, the American online social network service started in July 2006 with less than 10 employees, and quickly became a worldwide company that is worth today about $4.5 billion, with more than 35 offices around the world and supported in more than 40 languages. Today, Twitter is best described as a news and social network, based on quick and short messages called “tweets.” These were restricted to 140 characters at the beginning, but in November 2017, the limit was doubled to 280 characters, boosting the possibilities.
Just like any other social network, Twitter registered users can post tweets about any subject, interests, products, and sites visited or actions they are performing at the moment. At the same time, they can search for information about users they follow like friends, family, celebrities, athletes, brands, institutions, and companies or even discover new users and accounts to follow. However, Twitter’s beauty relies on how easy it is to scan through the messages in search of useful, interesting, and valuable information. Its length restriction makes it a unique, powerful and friendly tool to scan and track down the most meaningful data you desire in real-time.
Twitter is an extremely powerful social network
Whether you plan to use Twitter as a broadcaster, the receiver of both. Twitter is a fantastic, free communication medium with a broad worldwide audience. It stands out from the rest for being a sweet and accurate mixture of instant messaging, microblogging, and texting. It has become an extremely popular social network tool, with over 330 million monthly active users, who post more than 500 million tweets per day.
Twitter’s fast and friendly scan feature, makes it ideal to stay and keep your followers updated. A short message can be retweeted in a matter of seconds, any number of times, becoming viral in a blink of an eye. To make things even more interesting, their 100 million daily social network users, not only post messages every second, minute, hour and day, but they also perform even more searches, serving more than two billion search queries per day.
These attributes make Twitter extremely attractive for celebrities, journalists, advertisers, news agencies, and companies that have found it a powerful marketing and promotional weapon.
Twitter as a free broadcasting and communication tool
The possibility of catching people’s attention in real-time through a short and smart message makes Twitter an ideal communication tool for journalists, celebrities, and virtually anyone who wishes to establish a strong personal relationship with their audience. Of course, it is inevitable to cross by posts of users sharing dull and boring aspects of their own lives, but its friendly interface makes it quite easy to get rid of those unwanted posts and hit the important stuff. Besides, Twitter’s valuable content keeps constantly and rapidly rising, as more companies and users understand the power of sharing relevant content to strengthen up relationships with their followers.
In the same way as other social networks, Twitter can be used or accessed through several platforms. Mobile is Twitter users number one choice of access to the network, with an 80 percent preference. Mobile access gives everyone the chance of sharing what’s going on in a brief, fast, creative, and striking way in real-time. This feature has provided to many of the faculty of becoming an amateur journalist, sharing breaking news, stories, developing events, and the most recent news and updates about their project, product, brand, and even personal life.
As news travels faster online than on any other communication medium, Twitter is becoming one of the most popular news sources. In fact, according to Twitter, at least 74 percent of their users started to use the network in search of their daily news doze. That makes it an ideal platform to share essential articles, hosting exciting and important debates and discussions.
Twitter has likewise become an ideal platform for brands and businesses to promote their corporate blog, reaching more potential customers, as they build a reliable and trustworthy relationship with them. It is an essential step in any SEO campaign today. It is also a great way to stay on top of your customers’ needs and demands as you can easily interact with them. That is a great way for customer feedback recording and learning about their satisfaction. All the data collected provides valuable leverage to dissipate any negative message or to counter-attack a competitors advertising campaign.
Twitter’s power for business
Establishing a constant and fluent interaction between your business and potential customers is a rule of thumb for any business that wishes to succeed, and Twitter provides precisely that. Twitter is a great platform to increase the opportunity to make more sales and grow your revenue. Companies are able to learn just what their potential customers desire and what their competition is doing in order to reach them. It also allows businesses to update potential customers about their latest sales and promotions.
Twitter is a popular resource for customers all along the purchasing funnel. Twitter users tend to share shopping tips, latest deals, reviews, and feedback about specific products, proving to have an amazing influence on potential customers buying decisions. According to Twitter, their audience is leaned-in, influential, and passionate with a variety of interests, these make them extremely receptive. They stated that nine out of ten Twitter users have actively engaged in a conversation with the small, medium, and big businesses and 93 percent of people who follow an SMB on Twitter plan to purchase from them. In addition, 69 percent have already purchased from an SMB they follow. Twitter data also shows that 57 percent of Twitter users said they discovered an SMB on Twitter and 73 percent of people feel better about an SMB after following them on Twitter. This makes Twitter a social network ideal for small, medium and big businesses that are looking for ways to reach specific targeted audiences.
Twitter also provides a vast number of advertising SEO tools and metrics to get insights in real-time from followers, and the people who have engaged with your Tweets. You can gain access to valuable data like user demographics, interests, lifestyle, purchasing behaviors, operating systems, brands they follow, and other variables that will help you create the most accurate and relevant content to any specific target audience.
Tracking the market via Twitter
Social networks and big data have changed completely the way advertisers design and build their marketing campaigns, strategies and promotions. The amount of specific details this data provides about your potential customers allows the advertiser to create messages tailored to their customers’ needs and goals, reaching more potential clients. In addition, Twitter is completely different from other networks in the fact that you don’t need to be a digital marketing expert or highly trained to read and understand metrics to exploit Twitter’s fascinating marketing advantages. All you have to do is pay attention to your followers and Twitter users.
People on Twitter are incredibly influential. A great example of this was the recent holiday season. According to Twitters own data, users were 83 percent more likely to offer advice to friends and family about holiday gifts and 49 percent more likely to say they spend a significant amount of time researching gifts compared to people not on Twitter. Just by scanning over for a few weeks it was easy to notice how much Twitter users were posting discussions about their holiday shopping ideas and reviews. From clothes to toys, retailers had a gold mine on their hand.
Twitter stated that for the 2018 holidays, the hot topic of the season was toys, with 621k Tweets per day, just in the United States. Mainly men were the ones posting about toy purchases and reviews with 69 percent, while women made up to 31 percent. Most Tweeted items or toys were: board games, like chess, followed by popular hero action figures and dolls.
The second main topic for 2018 holidays, was clothes and fashion with 607k Tweets per day. According to Twitter, the conversation about animal print clothing has seen a 28% increase since October, mostly women looking to pair their animal prints with other accessories. Imagine what this level of detailed data and information can provide to an advertiser or a fashion retailer at the right moment.
Promote your app through Twitter
The millions of Twitter users who access to the network every day, come to Twitter eager to discover what’s new, not only searching for products or ideas, but Twitter has also become an excellent platform to explore and learn about new apps. According to a Twitter survey, at least 58 percent of their users have installed an app in the last month.
Another exciting aspect about the Twitter platform is how much their team has enhanced it, looking to adapt each time to their users’ needs better. A great example of it is how, after understanding their influential power over the different app users out there, Twitter provided a series of mobile app promotion tools designed to reach and connect to this highly receptive audience. Driving app installs is the first step for any app marketer, but building and keeping a robust, reliable, and fluent connection with their users is what can make the difference, helping them overcome and succeed against the millions of other apps out there competing.
Twitting to success
No matter from where you look at it, your personal objectives or business goals, Twitter has become one of the most important communication, social media, and advertising tools any business, project, brand, entrepreneur, or professional character should use. Its friendly interface and straight to the point format makes it extremely attractive, versatile and useful.
There is even an addictive, clever challenge, of being able to convey a brilliant and creative message in just 280 characters. Which -in my opinion- makes it incredibly appealing. It was quite interesting to discover that according to Twitter, their active audience is more educated and professionally inclined. In the U.S. at least 28 percent of Americans with a college degree use Twitter, compared to 24 percent of those with some college education, and 14 percent of those with a high school diploma or less. Also, at least 45 percent of those who use Twitter to get their news, have a college degree. No wonder there is a vast range of Twitter users that are professional journalists.
On the other hand, Twitter users are likely to have an above-average income. Twitter reports that about 30 percent of United States users earn around 75 thousand dollars or more, followed by a 26 percent who make more than 50 thousand dollars. So, as you can see, the Twitter audience in general, is a desirable audience to reach, with a high-level of possibilities. Anyone who can exploit this with creativity, accuracy, and intelligence will have the doors to success open wide.
Remember that it is vital, when creating your tweets, to respect your followers. Treat them with care and interest. They need to feel appreciated and that they are interacting with another human being. According to Twitter, 70% of users retweet because they like a businesses content, and they will be closer to your brand if they feel emotional and familiar.
Don’t forget to take advantage of the media. Visual elements can be added to your message to make it more attractive and appealing. Twitter data shows that attaching an image on your tweet will boost the engagement up to 313 percent and it will have a 52 percent more chance of being retweeted. So, for those numbers, always try to look for a good image or rich media to come along with your text message.
Recapitulating, Twitter is today, one of the most powerful, user-friendly, direct, free, communication, advertising, and social networking tool. With more than 330 million monthly active users, posting more than 500 million tweets per day, this 4.5 billion dollar company has proven to be a must for any SMB that wishes to succeed in their market. Contact Impressions Agency and get your Twitter strategy tailored specifically to your goals and needs. Happy tweeting!
