Is there a marketing value in “tweeting?”

/in /by
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To tweet or not to tweet? Time-waster or necessary
pulse-meter?
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When you jump into the pool of 10 million Twitter visitors,
consider looking before you leap. If you’ve jumped in and
splashed around in Twitter, do you ever wonder who’s in
there with you? Wonder if it’s an environment that could
provide some real value in your marketing plan?
Or is it just the latest social networking trend that will soon
fade? Will it evolve into a niche market communication space?
(e.g. MySpace, once neck-in-neck with market leader FaceBook,
is now used primarily by the younger set
to keep up with their favorite bands).

With a growth rate of 700% since last year now tweeting is
clearly mainstream. But can you guess who’s using it the
most? It’s not the under-20 set. Surprisingly, the biggest
demographic that uses Twitter is the 45-54 year-old
demographic. People in that age range are more likely to be
economic decision-makers. You know.. the ones who have the
power to hire you.

Have  you thought what you might say in 140 characters-or
less? Have you thought about how your “tweet” might be
received by someone in your target audience? How valuable
is a tweet about a banal action? I’m somewhat amazed that
in an information-overloaded economy people are taking up
someone’s attention bandwidth with posts like : “I just
woke up. Am heading to get coffee.”

Here’s why I follow certain people: what they ‘tweet’
solves a problem/answers a question/broadens my
worldview/makes me laugh/makes me aware of important
information or upcoming events/inspire me to get involved
in making the world better. I suspect your potential
clients have the same perspective when deciding if
they want to follow you.

One other thing I love-and also hate-about Twitter is its “Jungle
drums, real time reporting” of what’s happening…NOW.
It’s a central part of the information-overloaded zeitgeist. I
think anyone who spends more than 15 min. a day on-line has
psychological chip in them that’s programmed to want
current information and fears being out-of-the-loop.
OK..so I’ve just publicly admitted my personal neurosis; no
doubt created by too many years in the photo ad biz 😉

The informality and connection-by-choice
“ambient connections”  that Twitter (and
FaceBook) create, can be low-key, low-stress ways to keep
your brand in front of people who already know and like
you.

I suspect, for example, that if you just attended a
multi-day photo tech conference, news about your new-found
expertise in HDR might be worth a tweet.

When everyone has is so little time to do it all,
there is real value in getting news and cool resources.
from a community of choice.

What makes you follow someone? I’d love to know.

Read more about the size of the Twittering audience in this article. 

Over the past several months, we at comScore have watched how quickly traffic to Twitter has exploded. Worldwide visitors to Twitter approached 10 million in February, up an impressive 700+% vs. year ago. The past two months alone have seen worldwide visitors climb more than 5 million visitors. U.S. traffic growth has been just as dramatic, with Twitter reaching 4 million visitors in February, up more than 1,000% from a year ago.

Reuters reporter Alexei Oreskovic recently authored an interesting blog post about the demographics of Twitter users. What he discovered was that 18-24 year olds, the traditional social media early adopters, are actually 12 percent less likely than average to visit Twitter (Index of 88). It is the 25-54 year old crowd that is actually driving this trend. More specifically, 45-54 year olds are 36 percent more likely than average to visit Twitter, making them the highest indexing age group, followed by 25-34 year olds, who are 30 percent more likely.

The skew towards older visitors, although perhaps initially surprising for a social media site, actually makes more sense than you might think at first. With so many businesses using Twitter, along with the first generations of Internet users “growing up” and comfortable with technology, this is a sign that the traditional early adopter model might need to be revisited.