I’ll be honest, I’ve never been a big fan of Twitter. I much prefer to use other social media platforms, such as Facebook and LinkedIn.
However, I’m not a complete fool and realise there are many active users on Twitter and as mentioned in my previous blog, you should always go where your audience go. Therefore I tried to help my team by actively getting involved in a couple of our Twitter accounts e.g. Strategy Plus . After a month of having daily input, posting various different types of content and interacting with other Tweets. I found it hard to believe that there had been very little engagement. Even with a couple of thousand existing followers and by including relevant hashtags, other account handles etc.
I took a moment to think about what I was doing and realised most of the people on Twitter were doing the same, tweeting and interacting to get noticed. The only people interacting with us were people trying to get our attention or people within our industry. The people we wanted to interact with, weren’t interested. Why was this? I believe Twitter is more about conversation and most business accounts publicise things to everyone rather than genuinely trying to make conversation.
I also realised that most people using Twitter go there to follow people rather than brands as you can see by the top 100 accounts. This goes back to my conversation point, you don’t have conversations with brands, but you do with people. You will notice the top brand accounts are news or sports clubs, great sources for the very latest information. Not even a mention of famous retail brands such as Apple, Nike or even Coca-Cola.
This resulted in me creating my own twitter account and starting from scratch. After 2 months I had over 230 followers (2 years later I have 1044), which is not Taylor Swift territory but still good progress considering in comparison to some business accounts. However I’m still disappointed by the lack of progress and have come to the conclusion that if you don’t use Twitter for more than 45 minutes a day, no great strides will be taken.
Unfortunately I don’t have 45 minutes spare every day and neither do most people. The majority of people are on Facebook and not only are they on there, they are also engaging. We manage an account with 8100 Facebook likes and 6400+ Twitter followers. And even though I have been posting more and taking more time on Twitter, it has still resulted in 171 clicks to the website coming from Facebook and just 69 from Twitter.
The fact is, the majority of accounts on Twitter are having a one-way conversation to get attention. This is resulting in poor engagement. An article by Rani Molla in Bloomberg got my attention recently, as she gives some insight into the matter with some great stats comparing Facebook with Twitter . It highlights the fact that Facebook is far more popular in terms of account numbers, time spent and engagement.
As a result, if you had to choose, then spend your time on Facebook raising your brand awareness. However I always believe you should have a presence everywhere your audience is. Therefore create a brand page, a personal page, get involved in conversations and be a genuine source of quality original insights. Because it’s all about building awareness and the perception of your brand.
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