Although sites like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn are all incredibly popular options for social media, it is wise to examine your intended use and fit that use with the right site when planning your marketing strategy. There are many success stories with each possibility, such as the story about Pizza Hut using Twitter essentially as a cross between customer service and marketing, but today’s article by Doug Caverly, entitled “New Twitter Stats Highlight Lack of Stickiness” show trends in social marketing that shouldn’t be ignored.
The crux of the article is that many people and businesses sign up for Twitter and either never use it or use it a few times. Even more concerning is that some accounts have never taken the time to build a network of followers on Twitter. Here are the bare statistics that have come to light:
– At the end of 2009, there were 75 million Twitter accounts, with July being the peak month for increased membership
– Each month 6.2 million new accounts are activated (2-3 per second)
– 25% of accounts have no followers
– 40% of accounts have never sent a single Tweet
– 80% of all Twitter users have tweeted fewer than ten times
These are grave statistics for Twitter to consider, and surely, there will be growth in the future and changes to address the underlying issues that may be contributing to the statistics that show a large number of users either give up on it before they really get started or just fail to build any network on the site at all. Still, with the growth rate that Twitter is maintaining, there’s no need to throw your hands up and walk away. The fact is that lots of users are employing Twitter: if you just flip around the statistic on how many people are not using Twitter more than 10 times to find the 20% that are using it repeatedly, we see that 15 million users are tweeting. That’s still a respectable number.
For now when assessing your online marketing strategies, it is important to be aware of some of the limitations of social media. It’s not just up to Twitter to fix itself, but up to us to know how we will use these tools effectively. Working creatively with sites like Twitter and Facebook can gain your business followers and sales, but it will still be work to get a network up and running. They won’t run on their own and they do need regular attention. Internet marketing experts can guide you through this process, which may be the edge needed for your business to gain ground in this new realm of marketing.