A 6 month analysis of Twitter users trends and favoured topics has some startling news for brands: they're not part of the conversation.
The report – Twitter & the Consumer-Marketer Dynamic – aimed to examine how consumers and brands are using Twitter and determine how marketeers can adopt consumer patterns to improve their own presence. It's key findings found that more than 90% of tweets come from consumers, which is as expected as Twitter is a consumer dominated medium, largely for people, not corporations.
Only 12% of consumer tweets mention a brand and the top brands mentioned are Twitter itself, Apple products/brands and Google. So brands aren't the focus of the chat. But that doesn't mean Twitter isn't an important tool for brands to utilise.
The report suggests that "there are ripe opportunities for brands to get to know their customers via online listening" it's a unique mostly un-filtered, un-moderated environment where we can hear the real "word on the street" with 92% of users keeping their tweets public. Dialogue is the key to brand presence on twitter: "Companies tend to talk at people – not with them" is the core criticism. Currently only 12% of all marketer tweets demonstrate active dialogue with consumers, indicating most are failing to tap into the platform's full potential. Brands need to stop simply passing on information but begin to more actively connect by engaging in two-way conversations.
Posted by Strategem on 2010-07-28 10:16:13