Twitter gets a ton of press. Marketers are falling over themselves trying to find ways to leverage it to connect with their audience. Recently I wrote about marketing with Twitter and suggested that it might not be the silver bullet organizations are looking for.
Today I read this eMarketer article detailing research regarding what people are actually using Twitter for.
Take a look at this chart.
I think everyone had suspicions this was the case, I know I did. Self-promotion (marketing) and “passing along value” (retweets) collectively represent less than 15% of the activity on Twitter. According to the research more than 75% of the activity is merely chatter. Maybe it’s about your product?
I want to say for the record that this is only one study and may not be indicative of the future of Twitter as adoption grows (if it does). Taken on face value the data does support the argument that focusing marketing efforts on Twitter alone would be short-sited.
You can read more about the report and view the white paper here.
Tags: self promotion, social media marketing, social networking, tweets, twitter, user generated content
