How Much Skin Should You Have in the Twitter Game?
Weighing ROI for business social media marketing
4 minute reading time
When social media management resources are limited, small businesses wonder whether their stats support keeping a Twitter presence. The answer isn’t a simple yes or no.
What should a small business owner be looking for when reading their Twitter analytics? Followers? Retweets? Likes? When celebrities have more than 100 million Twitter Followers, is there any point to an account with just a few hundred? It may be a relief to know that the average number of Followers is about 700, but more important than the Follower number is your Engagement Rate.
A long list of Followers who don’t engage with you are neither customers nor advocates, so a smaller list that is responsive is worth much more to your business. To keep them engaged, check how many Likes and Retweets your posts get and see what they are liking and sharing. Those are the kinds of posts you want to create in the future to encourage even more engagement. Experts caution that engagement on Twitter is lower than on Facebook, so when your Engagement Rate is better than 0.5%, that is something to celebrate.
Experts are also predicting that Twitter may be at the end of its road and that may be true. It’s growth has slowed dramatically, making it the eighth most popular social media platform in the western world with 330 million users compared to Facebook’s 2.6 billion users. Of those users, many confess that Twitter is also not their primary platform.
Still, 330 million is a lot of people! Some of those people are your current customers or could be your customers in the future, so it makes sense for small business owners to put effort into maintaining an active presence.
Customers have become used to tweeting complaints and questions, which makes Twitter a great, cheap tool for customer service. As long as they are paying attention to their Twitter feed, small businesses can respond to customers quickly and provide immediate answers or suggest the next step for finding a solution. This kind of Twitter engagement means spending more time listening than broadcasting.
Even if they aren’t actually engaging with you, folks are still looking at your Twitter stream to see if you are appropriately active and responsive. If you haven’t tweeted since 2017, they can’t help but question the vitality and reliability of your business. Prospective clients, partners, employees, and others all do this kind of research – you know they do, because you’ve done it yourself! This kind of Twitter engagement means creating content on a regular basis.
While the importance of Twitter to any specific company may differ, every small business should be allocating effort to maintaining an active presence with consistent content in response to the engagement statistics in their analytics. If you would rather delegate that task, Sprocket Websites has a team that can take over for you. Just give us a call to learn more!
Image “Red Blue and Yellow Textile,” by Brett Jordan, licensed under CC0 via Pexels
Kate Gingold
I have been writing a blog with web marketing tips and techniques every other week since 2003. In addition to blogging and client content writing, I write books and a blog on local history.
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I have been writing a blog with web marketing tips and techniques every other week since 2003. In addition to blogging and client content writing, I write books and a blog on local history.
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