Research: Taking Twitter personally
By Steve Mullins. Be engaging. Consumers don’t want brands to go around advertising on Twitter – what they ought to do is engage with customers instead, according to the Ultimate Twitter Study, conducted by InSites Consulting/talktochange.
“People want brands to listen,” Tom de Ruyck, senior R&D manager at Insites, told last week’s Mobile Research Conference 2010 in London. “And they should talk in a personal way.”
That makes sense if Insites is right about how members of the Twitterverse use the 14-character platform.
One Ultimate respondent called Twitter ‘my virtual watercooler’. Another said it was their ‘worldwide refrigerator’ hung with lots of notes.
Some brands, though, are using Twitter as aresearch tool. de Ruyck cites Buick as a case in point, explaining that the US car maker was planning to launch a new SUV until it encountered a lot of negative sentiment on the platform, especially around the environmental impact of the vehicle. He added that Buick decided not to go ahead with the roll out because of these findings.
Insites says just 5% of tweets are branded, with the top three Twitter brands being, unsurprisingly, Google, Apple and Amazon, with the likes of Nokia, Skype and eBay also in the high echelons of the rankings.
“Twitter is a marketing tool – not in terms of numbers, but in terms of engagement,” de Ruyck said. “We’re talking about how many conversations you have with your followers.”
And while the audience might be small, it could well be of high value.
“People who generate a lot of traffic are generally influential,” de Ruyck said.
