Are you Tweeting "Pointless Babble?"
Before you or your company decide to jump in to Twitter with some Tweets you think are relevant, you might be interested in a recent (short-term) study by Pear Analytics to be sure your Tweets aren’t falling into certain catagories.
Pear took snapshots of Twitter every 30 minutes (between 11:00 am and 3:00 pm) and picked up a total of 2,000 messages. They then placed these into six categories: Spam – News – Self Promotion – Pointless Babble – Conversational – Tweets with Pass-Along Value.
And here’s the interesting results:
40.5% message posted were pointless babble
37.5% were conversational tweets
8.7% were said to have “Value” (loosely defined as news of interest)
5.85% constituted as self-promotion
3.75% were labeled as spam
So what’s the point to this? Well, there’s a few things to remember before someone tells you or your company that you really need to start tweeting on Twitter because of its tremendous growth over the past year and, of course, you certainly don’t want to be left behind in this online opportunity if you think you can get as many followers such as Lance Armstrong (53,813) or maybe Britney Spears (53,290) –
But wait … you might also want to take a look at exactly “who” is using Twitter as presented in a recent article by eMarketer just to be sure that your target market might be hanging out there …
Certainly Twitter (as well as other online tactics) can have value, but as an Interactive marketing agency, it’s critical to be responsible and not reactionary regarding online marketing opportunities in order to manage our client’s expectations. Clear strategy and setting realistic goals is always a good first step!