Twitter is a strange platform. On the one hand, they’re in the top ten largest social networks in the world. They’re even in the top five, depending on your definition of social network. They have hundreds of millions of monthly active users.
On the other hand, they’ve reported little or no user growth over the last quarters. They’re facing steep backlash due to their handling – or lack of handling – of hate speech on the platform. People have been writing articles for years talking about how Twitter may be dying.
On the other hand, it’s one of those sites that has perhaps way too much inertia to actually fold. They may decline over a decade, or they may innovate. They may be sold to some other big company and restructure the entire site. Or they might stay exactly the way they are. With the recent expansion to 280 characters, they’re certainly looking to innovate. The same goes for their upcoming rules change involving adding hate speech to their bannable offenses list.
In any case, it’s still a very potent site for any business to use. Twitter might have a clouded future, but their present is still very much alive. Need convincing? Read on for a big pile of reasons why Twitter is useful for business, even with it’s drawbacks.
1. You Can Reach a Very Targeted Audience
Twitter doesn’t have the same kind of targeting that Facebook has, nor does it have a huge bank of analytics you can use to see individual data on your users. Instead, it’s a very open platform, where anyone can find your content through immense viral potential. You might have an audience of 50 people, but one retweet from one popular person can give your tweet a reach in the tens of thousands or more.
Despite this, you still reach very specific people: the people who are most likely to be interested in your content. That’s because everyone who is likely to share your content is someone who likes it, and anyone who follows that person is likely to like the kind of content they like and share. Your audience is not just your followers, but the followers of everyone who retweets you.
2. You Can Reach People Immediately
One of the greatest benefits of Twitter is the immediacy of the channel. When you have something new to tell everyone, and you post it on your blog, it can take a while for that information to trickle through your audience. When you post it on your blog and send out a press release, it can make the news, but it might not be newsworthy enough to be published everywhere. Press releases also have a delay.
Twitter, meanwhile, has an instantaneous ability to reach your audience. Anyone online at the time can see the post immediately. Anyone coming online will see it as they scroll through their feed. Anyone checking your Twitter will see it when they check. This immediacy has allows companies to use Twitter as a channel for updates, product issues, and anything that causes customer-facing problems on a widespread basis.
3. Twitter Makes a Great Customer Service Channel
The immediacy of Twitter works both ways. People generally expect a brand Twitter account to be monitored. They expect that when they send a tweet at your brand account, they can have their message seen and their issue addressed. You see it time and time again; an airline treats people unfairly until they take to Twitter. A bus line loses luggage until Twitter outcry forces them to find it. Internet service is spotty until customers take to Twitter and force the company to face the issue.
Twitter, on their part, facilitate this. They have a number of features you can use to help address issues and speed up response times. One such features is their Quick Replies function, which you can read about here. If you’re good at customer service, people will appreciate your brand more. And if you’re not, well, people will take to Twitter to try to put social pressure on you to address their issues. You might as well make the effort, right?
4. You Can Reach People You Wouldn’t Normally Access
There are a ton of people using Twitter who wouldn’t normally see your blog. A lot of people live their lives in a way that almost never takes them to a site blog. They might look at your website to see your product page, they might look at some reviews, but they’re probably not actually interested in your blog.
These same people, however, spend most of their time on one social media platform or another. When you can use those social media platforms with fluency and skill, you can reach those people on their home turf. Your message comes to them, and not even necessarily in the form of an ad. You can reach them and attract them through familiarity. Later, when it comes time to buy, they’ll recognize your name from the content they see on Twitter and will be more likely to think of you first.
5. You Get Direct, Personal Engagement
On Facebook, when you respond to any comment made on your post, there’s a sort of unspoken assumption that your response is for everyone, not just for the customer on hand. If you want to discuss something individual or personal with the customer, you take to a direct message.
On Twitter, replies are hidden by default, and though they’re still public, they have the impression of being a personal interaction. You can address people on a more personal level, and they can interact with you on a personal level as well. Some brands even specialize in those more personal interactions, like how Wendy’s has been going off the last few years.
6. Twitter Makes a Level Playing Field for Networking
One interesting thing about Twitter is that paying money or upgrading to a special account isn’t something you can do to gain any advantage. Anyone at any time can opt into the ads program, regardless of their status as a business. Your mom could spend $5 and run ads if she wanted. The fact is, the playing field is largely level. Sure, some people can reach millions of people while others struggle to reach a few thousand, but it’s not an inherent limitation of the platform or the account. You have the potential to have millions of followers.
7. It’s Widespread Free Marketing
Twitter is free. The only operating costs with using it are the costs of developing the content you post on it, and you don’t even have to pay that much for someone to manage Twitter for you.
Even if you do choose to spend money on ads, you don’t have to spent too much. With purely organic Twitter you can reach thousands upon thousands of people with relative ease, and more if you grow well. What other marketing channel is free and can make that claim?
8. Using Twitter is Best Practice
If you don’t believe me, you can just talk to pretty much any other marketer out there. Top brands throughout your industry and every other industry are making heavy use of Twitter. Just like ten years ago, when it was a struggle to convince brands they needed a website to truly succeed, Twitter is now considered part of a best practice, comprehensive marketing strategy. If you’re not using Twitter, well, you’re missing out.
9. Your Competitors are Using Twitter
I can guarantee you that at least some of your primary competitors are using Twitter, actively. Your strongest competitors locally might not be using it, but it’s only a matter of time before they pick it up.
If they’re not using it, hey; that’s an opportunity for your to take over the niche before they get to it. If they are already using it, you’re playing catch-up and really need to get to work. The longer you delay, the harder it will be to compete with them in a niche they have dominated.
10. Your Competitors are Using Twitter
Yes, I know I listed this twice, but that’s because there’s unique ways of looking at it. On the one hand, they’re competition. On the other, they’re broadcasting a lot of information about their marketing strategies. You can use their Twitter presence to analyze what does and doesn’t work in your industry, at least with their audience. If their audience is similar enough to yours, you can use it to gain insight into techniques you can adopt without much experimentation. Let them make the first missteps, follow in their footsteps, and surpass them when the opportunity arises.
11. People Use Twitter to Talk About You
Even if you’re not on Twitter, you know who is? Your audience. A lot of the people who use your products or follow your blog, the people who like your brand and the people who have had bad experiences, they’re all on Twitter. They’re on Twitter talking about you already, and they know the fact that you don’t have a Twitter account – or at least not an active one – is a detriment. It’s a customer service channel they can’t use, and it’s a place they can leave their opinions without your intervention. You can bet that people will take to Twitter with negative opinions, so you should be there to refute them.
12. Twitter can Build Website Links
People link to websites on Twitter all the time. Twitter backlinks don’t count for much, but you know who uses Twitter? A lot of other bloggers. People who like to find new content to link to, to cite, or to reference.
I find a lot of the topics I write about on Twitter, as conversation or as extrapolation from a given topic. I’ve definitely linked to sites just because they were the popular reference I saw on Twitter. You, too, could be one of those links for an untold number of people.
13. It’s Excellent for Product Updates
Twitter’s immediacy has been covered, but it’s worth taking an extra second to note that it’s a powerful site for keeping your customers updated about your product. It’s especially valuable if you have a web app as a product, or a piece of software that gets frequent updates. Whenever there is downtime, whenever there is a reason to inform your customers of maintenance, whenever you’re planning a new feature, Twitter can distribute that news immediately and to a large number of people.
14. Twitter Chats and Discussions Cement Your Authority
Many industries have what are called Twitter Chats. Twitter chats are conversations scheduled in an open format, centering around a single hashtag that isn’t widely used otherwise.
The idea is to get interested parties and industry leaders together to discuss topics related to everyone. If you can participate in a Twitter chat successfully, you can cement your position as someone who knows something, as a brand that has authority and knowledge. It puts you ahead of the people who don’t have that same kind of intelligence outlet.
15. Twitter Ads Can be Very Potent
Everything above has mostly focused on the free value you can get from Twitter, but I should at least mention that Twitter ads are very potent. They might not be as targeted as Facebook or as widespread as Google, but they’re up there, and you get a lot of exposure for a low price. Twitter ads can be some of the cheapest exposure you can get online, and it’s well worth having a small budget to run those ads on a monthly basis.
