Posts Tagged ‘twitter statistics’

Twitter Links for Marketers

Tuesday, September 9th, 2008

If you are trying to promote your blog, there are already numerous posts about how to use Twitter. But for marketers, Twitter might still be a difficult story to tell (or sell.) One of our first tasks at Cherp was to begin doing research specifically about Twitter to help build the case for our clients and future clients for why Twitter deserves it’s own attention in the marketing strategy. However there are a number of really helpful documents out there to help you define your strategy, sell Twitter/social networking internally or to clients, and probably how to better leverage it yourself.

1. Sapient - Survey…Top 10 Wish List for Agencies of the Future. Great document if you are working on strategy for your agency and you need to know how much energy to put into social networks. #7,8 and 9 are personal favorites of mine.

2. Emarketer - Sign up here to get their email newsletter. Every week there is data related to social network usage or social network advertising spending. It’s very helpful to monitor marketing trends and help with strategy definition.

3. Business Week - Various articles over the last few months have focused on Twitter, but I think the article about “How Companies use Twitter to Bolster Their Brands” is particularly good.

4. Inc Magazine - “Business Uses for Twitter” is a more general look at Twitter use for business, but in my experience when you are trying to make the case articles like this help.

5. New York Times - Brave New World of Digital Intimacy offers an important perspective on this topic and is a must read.

I also recommend Crunchbase for additional statistics about Twitter, although, the most important ones don’t seem to be disclosed anywhere (we’re working on that though, so stay tuned.)

Twitter Marketing Statistics from Cherp

Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008
New Blog

We’ve been working hard to finish up our first few case studies, and as a part of that we’ve been gathering data on Twitter users that we feel backs up our case for Twitter as a marketing and branding platform.

Part of our research was to do research on 1000 random Twitter users, and measure the following information:

1. How do Twitter users access their Twitter account? (twitter.com, SMS, iPhone App, Blackberry App, other mobile app, blog or browser plugin)
2. % of Twitter users that are openly with a business (must have a URL to a business website in their profile)
3. Was the business user a techie/designer/other
4. % of Twitter users with an active blog linked from their profile
5. % of Twitter users with blog who actively promote the blog (10% of tweets link to blog)
6. % of users who work in social media in some capacity (non blog)
7. What % of Twitter users follow a brand (defined as a Twitter user using a brand name and a not posting for personal reasons)
8. What % of the brands followed were B2C or B2B
9. % of Twitter users employed in the media (TV/RADIO/NEWSPAPER/NON-BLOG WEBSITE)
10. % of Twitter users with at least 25% of their posts made from a mobile device
11. % of users who are actively promoting something versus simply tweeting
12. # of followers
13. # following the Twitter user

Since most of this information isn’t made public by Twitter, we needed to poll a large enough number to gather better statistics on the more than 2M active users.

For example, according to Compete.com Twitter had roughly 2.25M unique visitors (Quantcast has the number of people visiting Twitter at 1.5M.)

This is that magical hockey stick shaped growth that start-ups consider the ultimate sign of success. These numbers may not tell the whole story. The iPhone App Store offers 8 Twitter specific apps, and 2 others that allow users to post to Twitter. This doesn’t include the large number of blog or browser plugins, downloadable applications like Twhirl and sites like FriendFeed. When you consider this with our research which shows only 50% of Twitter users post from www.twitter.com, that number appears to be far greater.

Facebook may have 100M users, but with a closed network users are limited to a smaller segment of that 100M. Twitter’s open network and integration of search (after acquiring Summize a few months ago) means that Twitter offers the potential for much larger personal networks.

Stay tuned this week for more information from our research and the release of our first case study.