Lady Gaga is doing OK; not a sign of a pokerface when she looks at her bank balance. Nor when she looks at her Twitter ranking – number one. Whoopee..! But would she have done so well in her career without Twitter? That’s a question worth asking. After all, she has the power of a major record label behind her, so she would have done OK anyway. Plus, like her or not, she is talented and unlike many of the X-Factor contestants, she certainly has a voice. So without Twitter, she would have been a significant global brand anyway. What we need to know, is did Twitter enhance that brand?
The latest research on the value of Twitter is that it certainly would have helped Lady Gaga. It transpires that Twitter is much better for your brand because the users of Twitter are amongst the most influential on the Internet. They write more blogs than anyone else, they post more product reviews than anyone else and they syndicate more links than anyone else. In other words, Twitter users get your brand more “reach” than any other Internet users.
Often, people ask which is the best service to help boost their business – Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn? Many business people say things like “Oh, LinkedIn is the best”. But that is often based on hypothesis, rather than hard fact. Take a look at the rankings from Compete.com and you might think Facebook is the best. It has almost 130m unique visits a month, compared with only 14m a month for LinkedIn. Twitter is more than double that. LinkedIn is certainly “the baby” of the bunch.
But it is not about raw ranking numbers like this that you should focus on. It is what the networks do for you. Facebook certainly gets you noticed and gets you some “likes”. It enables you to engage with your customers. LinkedIn allows you to find business leads, to locate joint venture partners or search for potential members of staff. But Twitter gets you influence. The people on Twitter who talk about you will also get you into Facebook and LinkedIn and so on and so on. The result is that Twitter will put your brand or your company in front of more people than either Facebook or LinkedIn can do together.
In other words, of the three networks, Twitter should be the central part of your strategic approach. Exactly like Lady Gaga.
6 thoughts on “Twitter is more important for your brand than other social networks”
Interesting! I find that LinkedIn drives the most traffic but I have lots more followers on Twitter… Yet to crack Facebook really.
This is interesting. The intuitive response would be that you can use LinkedIn & Facebook to reach more of your business or consumer targets. I had been dismissing Twitter as birdseed to attract visitors to a website but it absolutely makes sense that those who tweet have greater influence.
Twitter will enhance you business's online visibility only if you play it right. You have to remember it's a social network, so be social on it. Provide information that people want to read, share and retweet other people's contributions that are worth while, acknowledge, comment and engage in conversations with vigour, empathy, politeness and a good sense of humour.
But Twitter isn't only about a lot of babbling on the net, it can be used to find out what others are doing, keep an eye on your competition, be on top of the latest trends, be the first to know of breaking news, break some news yourself before anyone else does, share your information about your business to a many more people than before, but only if you time it right, capture that passing audience with tweets that pin-point exactly what people want to read or listen to, have an affinity with what's hot at that particular moment, provide that special 'something' that will stop people in their tracks and make them take notice…
This is, of course, exactly what Lady Gaga has done.
Hello Graham – this is interesting; I have 100 followers, and I have proof that they don't read my tweets (I've offered a fiver just for a response 3 times now). One piece of advice is to interact (reply/retweet) more – I suppose I should work on that. Directed messages definitely cut through, but general Tweeting seems to be pointless.
I'm not sure I agree with your analysis. Offering £5 for a response could be perceived as a joke, so does not lead to a reply. Equally, with three offers and only 100 followers there is only a tiny chance that any one of them actually saw the offer anyway. So, it isn't proof that no-one reads your tweets. Indeed, saying that no-one goes into your local pub means that no-one know about it. But I suspect many people who never even visit it can name it confidently. One piece of evidence does not prove another fact. General Tweeting is as pointless as general conversation…er, which does have a point…..! In other words, I think general Tweeting only seems pointless when you don't do enough of it to enough people. Just like the real world, if you only said a few words every now and then to one or two people, instead of the millions of words you actually say to hundreds of people, then you would have no impact. Twitter is really important but you have to do it all the time – see my study results due out at the end of the month.
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