Awareness of Twitter Has Exploded: Great Way to Reach the Professional Tradesmen

Contractors are busy people, and the 140-character message is just enough to peak their curiosity and have them click through to your message.

Twitter is one of the social media tools that can be used as a tool for your company’s social media marketing strategy to generate online traffic and a pipeline for new business leads. Over the past year, the leading traffic generator to my blog has been Twitter.

Twitter Usage In America: 2010 is a new report derived from the Edison Research/Arbitron Internet and Multimedia Series. This report is derived from three years of tracking data on Twitter usage in the United States. It is filled with rich information that can help guide the use of Twitter for your agency and its clients.

Twitter is more of a broadcast channel than many realize. The majority of users never post anything…but they are definitely reading and clicking.

Here are some highlights from this comprehensive study and its untapped potential for marketing, advertising and your agency’s new business:

  • Awareness of Twitter has exploded over the past twelve months. The percentage of Americans who are familiar with Twitter has surged from 5% in 2008 to 87% in 2010. Twitter is a natural “companion medium” to other media channels – in particular, as an accompaniment to live TV.
  • Despite equal awareness, Twitter trails Facebook significantly in usage: 7% of Americans (17 million persons) actively use Twitter, while 41% maintain a profile page on Facebook.
  • Nearly two-thirds of active Twitter users access social networking sites using a mobile phone.
  • Twitter users split between habitual “Tweeters” and those who access occasionally. The majority of Twitter users are “lurkers,” passively following and reading the updates of others without contributing updates of their own but they are listening, reading and clicking.
  • Twitter users are far more likely to follow Brands/Companies than social networkers in general. Twitter users frequently exchange information about products and services.
  • 51% of active Twitter users follow companies, brands or products on social networks.
  • Most (70%) regular Twitter users do post status updates to some social networking service (likely Facebook). Twitter appears to be functioning as more of a broadcast medium compared to Facebook and many other social networking sites and services.
  • Marketing and business use cases for Twitter far exceed similar usage for social networking websites in general.

The full 49-page study, full of interesting graphs and data, is available for download: Twitter Usage in America: 2010 – Complete Report

If you like this post, you might find these interesting:

B-to-B Marketers: Tips on How to Optimize Twitter

What Kind of Twitterer Are You?

Twitter: How Useful is This Tool for B-to-B Marketers?

If you like this post, please pass it on.

Share

Share this: