Revised July 8, 2020. The original version of this post was published on the WebMarketCentral blog in January 2010.
Twitter’s user base has grown 10X in the past decade, as the platform has evolved from social media curiosity to vital communication channel. Yet it still holds vast untapped potential for business use.
Twitter now has more than 330 million users, and most businesses at least have a presence on the platform—though it is still often misunderstood and under-utilized. As reported here, the good news for Twitter is that more than 90% of B2B software companies have Twitter accounts.
The bad news is that only slightly more than half of those brand accounts are actually active. Further:
“29.6% of those accounts are dormant, having been essentially abandoned at some point in the last decade. Another 4.1% are barely active, tweeting twice per month or less on average. The remaining 1.5% of accounts were registered but never actually used.”
It’s even worse at the individual level. There are far more top executives active on LinkedIn than on Twitter.
In 2010, pointless “noise,” excessive self-promotion, and spam-like content were problems on Twitter. And, “to newbies it can seem like a bizarre online cocktail party where everyone is shouting and no one is listening.”
That’s still true, although political hate speech has become a bigger obstacle to broader business use today. By failing to push back against the cancel-culture mob, Twitter is scaring away business users. Creating a parallel Twitter for Business network may be an answer, though it may exclude too many users and too much activity to really be practical.
Still, what was true in 2010 remains true today: “For those who understand and learn to use it effectively, Twitter can be a powerful business tool.”
Here are seven 11 reasons every business needs to be on Twitter.
To Interact with Customers
For most business, it’s far easier and more profitable to generate continued or new business from existing customers than it is to acquire new ones. Growing existing customer business requires ongoing communication.
Staying in touch with customers via Twitter is not only more real-time than many other techniques, it’s also far more cost-effective than direct mail, attending trade shows, picking up the phone, or even maintaining a customer newsletter.
It’s not that Twitter can replace other communication methods completely of course, but it can reduce the required cost and frequency of high-touch interactions. Twitter has also become an essential channel for customer service, as nearly 50% of consumers use it for brand-related questions or problems.
To Interact with Prospects
Just as many of your customers are probably on Twitter, so are your prospects. They care far less about your advertising than about what your customers are saying about you, and how you respond. An active Twitter presence enables you to demonstrate strong customer service, rather than just claiming you offer it (after all, who advertises poor customer service?).
To Drive Website Traffic
Twitter is one of the best places to promote your business blog posts and other user-focused content. Per the Content Marketing Institute, Twitter is the second-most valuable platform for B2B content marketing, trailing only LinkedIn.
To Increase Brand Awareness
Sharing useful content, engaging with followers, and sharing content from industry thought leaders all help to grow your brand account following. As your company’s following on Twitter grows, your brand is exposed to a wider relevant audience.
To Influence the Influencers
Industry analysts, journalists, bloggers, and other influencers from most sectors of the economy are well-represented on Twitter.
Tweeting content of your own that will interest them (i.e. not just your marketing materials), retweeting content they post, and engaging in dialog is a great way to get these people talking, and writing, about your company. It’s less formal, more “social” and usually more effective than “cold” outreach.
To Amplify Advocates
Twitter provides not only an avenue for brand complaints and questions, but also praise and endorsements. Acknowledging and retweeting positive feedback benefits your brand, provides recognition to your brand advocates, and encourages more such activity.
To Support Partners
Nearly all B2B companies have important channel and / or technology partner relationships. Twitter is an excellent platform for cross-promoting each other’s news and content, expanding awareness of and benefits to all members of the partner network.
To Gain Market Intelligence
The fact that customers, prospects, and industry thought leaders are all using Twitter make it a valuable tool for monitoring the topics and concerns being discussed. This is a great potential source of new product/service enhancement ideas as well as topics for blog posts, white papers or other content.
Twitter is also a valuable tool for monitoring competitors. New funding, product enhancements, and other news is often shared first by brands on Twitter. Monitoring competitors’ Twitter feeds can provide insights into their strategy as well as what the market is saying about them.
To Become a Resource
Prospects don’t care about your products or services—they care about solving their problems. Demonstrating your knowledge of their industry and their challenges, for example by tweeting your thought-leadership blog posts and white papers, makes you a resource they can go to for helpful information.
That gives you the opportunity to explain how your products or services can help them, in a consultative fashion.
To Give the Business a Personality
Business websites are, necessarily, one-to-many communication. No matter how compellingly your site presents your value proposition, it’s still formal and impersonal. Twitter is a much more casual and conversational. Again using the example of Zappos, CEO Tony Hsieh has been successful on Twitter by sharing his personality.
Unlike a company website, Twitter is immediate, informal, and personal.
To Be Part of the Conversation
As noted above, your customers, prospects and key influencers are already having conversations about your industry, your competition—and quite possibly your company—on Twitter. If you aren’t participating in that conversion, you’re missing valuable intelligence, business opportunities, and possibly even the opportunity to prevent damage to your firm’s reputation.
Twitter is far more than a 140 280-character soapbox for celebrities, spammy “Internet marketers,” and the incorrigibly obnoxious. Savvy business tweeters can filter out the cacophony and create valuable dialogues with key participants in their marketplace.