InsightIQ Blog

Marketers prefer Twitter for social media marketing – for now

Oct 15 2009

A July 2009 study of Fortune 100 companies found that more companies had a presence on Twitter (54%) than on Facebook (29%). According to the study, which looked at corporate blogs in addition to Twitter and Facebook, about one-fifth of Fortune 100 firms only used one of the three channels. Those companies were overwhelmingly likely to choose Twitter (76%) over Facebook (14%) or blogging (10%).

The study also found that these top companies were using Twitter for several purposes: company news, customer service, marketing promotions and employee recruitment. In a recent blog, my colleague Julie Baker wrote about the success Dell has had using Twitter (to the tune of $3M). Comcast has been recognized as one of the leading players in the Twitter arena and they have very successfully used the service to address customer complaints and solve service issues. For Comcast (and really, any other brand), the outcome of positive resolution is that good customer service gets talked about in social media sites, which in turn promotes brand image.

Twitter is increasingly outperforming Facebook for email marketing campaigns too. Recent research shows that among US email campaigns, links to Twitter were more common than Facebook.

While the growth and popularity of Twitter has grown rapidly in the last few months, it still remains to be seen if it will continue to be preferred compared to Facebook and other social media sites including LinkedIn and MySpace.

I still believe that Facebook has an advantage when it comes to ad sales as the data is richer in nature comparted to Twitter. Twitter might be a great medium for customer service but Facebook will see more of the advertising budget than twitter in the short and long term.

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Dec 14 2009

# Naras Eechambadi said:

Ram,

Twitter does seem to have caught marketer's imaginations. However, I do think that the appropriate social marketing medium is a function of the marketing objective and the circumstance. Many of the examples above are situations which are time sensitive, particularly the customer service situations, where Twitter excels. Twitter is also a good vehicle for consumer marketing, but not necessarily in a B2B setting, except in high tech environments.