Do You Need To Be On Twitter?

If you’re like 80% of businesses, you can safely  ignore the cute little bird. Here’s why.

I got a chance to catch up with my friend Marti Barletta last week. It was delightful, as always, and fun to catch up on news of our lives, work, and families. But when the talk came around to marketing, Marti shared two astonishing bits of information.

1. She is now among the top .05% of Tweeters in terms of followers.
2. She has just over 700 followers.

You read that right, and because you can do math, you know what means: 99.5% of Tweeters have fewer than 700 followers.

How can this be, you ask?  Twitter is EVERYWHERE!  Dell, Walmart, and Four Seasons Hotels invite you to follow them on Twitter.  Cable news anchorpersons read tweets on the air. You know that Lindsay Lohan is upset, and that Aston and Demi are doing The Cleanse, because they posted it on Twitter. Maybe you even opened a Twitter account, just because you thought you should, and you haven’t used it since a month after you opened it.  The Old Spice Guy is responding to tweets via a whole series of towel-clad videos on YouTube.

And that’s why you should be on Twitter, if you want to bring your marketing program into the 21st century, right? Wrong.

In fact, everything I just said is why, if you’re like 80% of businesses, you probably won’t gain a thing by being on Twitter. You won’t have much to lose, either, unless you post things that are incredibly stupid — but you will be wasting your time.  Here’s why:

Dell, Walmart, and Four Seasons invite you to follow them on Twitter. Have you accepted? No? Why not? Because you don’t care? Because you have enough stuff to follow already?  Because you’d rather get information some other way?  Because you don’t have a Twitter account?  Because your Twitter account is somewhere…you think…maybe under the bed with the dust bunnies?

Twitter can be a good tool for communicating breaking tech news and frequent sales and other offers, but it’s not the only tool — and maybe not even the best one. Unless you post your Twitter feed elsewhere, you’ll only reach your Twitter followers.  They won’t stumble across your message on a casual visit to your website, blog, Facebook page, user forum or message board, or even mobile app.  So you might get traction that’s just as good, or even better, via one of those other channels.

Cable news anchorpersons read tweets on the air. News organizations use Twitter a lot, mostly as a tool to get up-to-the-minute information that they can follow up with traditional reporting. Why do cable news networks read tweets on the air? Partly, I’m sure, because it’s a faster — and shorter — way to get viewer feedback than traditional letters to the editor.  Partly, I suspect, because they have 24 hours of air time to fill. Every single dang stupid day.  If you’re not in the news business, you may not need Twitter.

You know that Lindsay Lohan is upset, and that Aston and Demi are doing The Cleanse, because they posted it on Twitter. But I’ll bet you read it on The Huffington Post, or People.com, or heard it on Entertainment Tonight.  Even for celebrities and other heavy Twitter users, the news is disseminated to the wider world via bigger channels.

Maybe you even opened a Twitter account, just because you thought you should, and you haven’t used it since a month after you opened it. You’re not alone. A study last year by Nielsen reported that Twitter has an alarming 60% churn rate — that is, 60% of Twitter users abandon their accounts within the first 30 days.

Twitter is like owning a Tamagotchi. Some people love it. Others find it amusing at first, and then kind of a pain.  And that’s the other side of Twitter — if you intend to use it for marketing, you have to keep feeding it, preferably every single dang stupid day.  You’re going out to an audience that is not quite as engaged as you might think, so you have to constantly give them something really interesting and fresh.

If you’re a celebrity trend-setter (or a celebrity train wreck),  your very life is the drama that your followers want to know about.  If you’re speaking for your company, not so much. That’s probably why even some very famous brands don’t have Twitter feeds. Take Clorox, for example. What are they going to say?  ”Day 2,327: still getting socks 30% whiter.”

The Old Spice Man is responding to tweets via videos on YouTube. Think about this sentence for a moment. Instead of responding to Tweets via Twitter, they’re responding via YouTube. Limitations of the medium aside, why might that be?  How about because there are a lot more people visiting YouTube than using Twitter?

As with all things on the Web, that’s the state of the art at this moment.  Things may change, and there may come a day when a Twitter feed is an indispensable marketing tool. But for most of us, that day is not yet.