Marketing Through Twitter

In today’s demanding consumer environment, social marketing is the cornerstone of any company’s marketing strategy. With more urban consumers accessing information online, social networking channels such as Facebook and Twitter are becoming increasingly relevant to companies as a medium to market products, garner opinion, and gather feedback.

Advantages of Twitter Marketing

With over 300 million active users, Twitter, the micro blogging social networking service is the largest of its kind in the world.

From a corporation’s point of view, Twitter provides a large base of potential customers at almost no cost. Twitter marketing costs significantly less than other forms of marketing. Twitter is also a global service, allowing firms to reach customers in locations where the company may not have an office presence.

Twitter groups make it easy for a company’s online marketing team to organize campaigns and reach out to customers directly through short, 140-character messages, and directing them through short URLs to larger, interactive marketing material such as videos and blog pages.

Twitter can be used as a tool to augment an affiliate marketing campaign and on conjunction with blogs, can be used to make money online, generating revenues for corporations and small businesses run by individuals who work from home.

The relative anonymity of Twitter also encourages an active customer voice, enabling analysts and the marketing team to receive direct, candid feedback about a product or service. It enables a firm to gather information about the consumer landscape, industry trends, and new ideas to fuel innovation.
Twitter can be used as a channel to send out teasers and information about upcoming products and engage with a target audience. The brevity of a Twitter message enables companies to be responsive to customer and client queries and use the medium for minor troubleshooting.

Disadvantages of Twitter Marketing

While Twitter is a powerful marketing medium, companies need to invest in a team that is aware of the norms and rules of Twitter communication. Marketing teams who are not aware of Twitter etiquette, jargon, memes, and general social networking etiquette may communicate inappropriate messages that damage the brand equity of the product or service being marketed.
Twitter’s 140-character restriction on a single tweet means that detailed information needs to be hyperlinked in the tweet. This may or may not generate hits on the URL due to an aversion users may feel to ‘formal’ marketing campaigns.
Spam is another significant drawback in the world of Twitter with corporate pages receiving more spam than individual users.

Twitter is an important tool that businesses can use to improve their viewership and relevance across time zones, understand the voice of their customers, and market new products.

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