Will Twitter Crash & Burn?
As reported by Propero, the microblogging site Twitter has shown a huge increase in popularity in the last year. Social media of all sorts is becoming an increasingly popular way for companies to find out about their customers, develop a relationship with them and market their brand and product to them. However some experts think that Twitter’s value is limited and believe that its popularity will reach a natural peak and then crash.
According to a poll by Ragan Communications and PollStream, 54% of professional communicators think that Twitter will reach a plateau and then decline. 28% report that their companies are using microblogging at the moment as part of their marketing communications. The companies who do tweet say they have felt the following benefits:
-increasing employee engagement
-improving customer service
-Improving reputation with customers
-boosting website traffic
Bob Hirschfed, senior public information officer for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, is representative of those who do not think that Twitter can be part of a sustainable online marketing campaign:
‘[It’s a fad] because everybody’s doing it,’ he said. ‘Ashton Kutcher and CNN have a steady supply of fans who want to know what they do. People like us, people with a job to do, every so often we do something of interest to the general public [but] we don’t have that steady supply of stuff that the public is interested in.’
Fad or not, Twitter is proving very successful for some businesses, the point being that the internet is a very fast-paced and adaptive medium and knowing this does not preclude a company for joining in whilst its running strong. The point is that it may peak and fall but that is irrelevant. Some more traditional companies are not interested in keep up with the times. However, for most it can do no harm.
Apart from the objection to it being a fad, professional communicators gave other reasons for companies non-presence on Twitter:
-Fearful managers reluctant to join in
-Lack of staff/time
-Belief that it won’t help the company
The general advice is to proceed with caution. As with anything there are pros and cons to social networking. Decide on the aim that you want a Twitter campaign to fulfil. Start slowly and monitor your results and then readjust as necessary.
A recent study by eMarketer predicted that Twitter users will increase from their present number of 12.1 million to 18.1 million by 2010. It remains to be seen what proportion of these will be company Twitterers.
Tags: microblogging, social marketing, social media, social networking, Twitter