Category Archives: Twitter

A few years ago you might have been forgiven for thinking Twitter was just another passing fad, not something your business should be wasting time on.

However the truth is that since its launch less than 5 years ago Twitter has enjoyed explosive growth and become an important player in the new media world. There are now estimated to be over 200 million Twitter users generating over 90 million “tweets” per day.

Far from being a inconsequential fad, Twitter can now be considered a viable and extremely effective part of your company’s marketing mix. Consider these statistics from two recent surveys:

• Twitter users are more educated and earn higher incomes than the general US population. (According to Edison Research April 2010).

• Twitter users tend to be earlier adopters of new products and technology than the general population (says Edison Research).

• 42% claim to use Twitter to learn about new products and services while 31% ask opinions about products and services via Twitter (Edison)

• 28% use Twitter to look for discounts or sales while 21% use Twitter to purchase products or services (Edison).

• Another 19% use Twitter to seek customer support (Edison).

• A separate survey in early 2010 revealed that 67% of US Twitter users are more likely to buy brands they follow (source: Chadwick Martin Bailey & Imoderate Research Technologies).

Certainly here at Sticky we have witnessed the power of a strong presence on Twitter, with both this agency and many clients benefiting from conversing in 140 characters. The above statistics come as no surprise to us. we often say that becoming highly active on Twitter has been one of the best business decisions we ever made. Twitter has become a crucial part of Sticky’s inbound marketing strategy.

So the question is….. if your business would like to attract more educated, higher income early adopters, why aren’t you on Twitter?

We have speculated for a while now that Google and Bing were starting to give more weight to Twitter and Facebook links as they move towards providing the most relevant and real-time search results. In fact, at the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco last November the Bing team acknowledged that social signals were becoming increasingly influential.

Now this is being confirmed officially by Google and Bing. Leading search engine blog Search Engine Land conducted an interview with Bing and Google recently to discuss how social signals are being measured. This is fantastic news for inbound marketing.

Here is an excerpt:

1) If an article is retweeted or referenced much in Twitter, do you count that as a signal outside of finding any non-nofollowed links that may naturally result from it?

Bing: We do look at the social authority of a user. We look at how many people you follow, how many follow you, and this can add a little weight to a listing in regular search results. It carries much more weight in Bing Social Search, where tweets from more authoritative people will flow to the top when best match relevancy is used.

Google: Yes, we do use it as a signal. It is used as a signal in our organic and news rankings. We also use it to enhance our news universal by marking how many people shared an article.

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As inbound marketers, one of the big questions clients ask us is which social networks they should be part of? “Should I join Twitter?”, “Will Facebook help build my business?”, “Is LinkedIn something we should consider?”

Twitter best for click-throughs

Our answer is always that different social networks can work well for different businesses, and each of them can be effective depending upon how you wish to use them.

Certainly here at Sticky we have found Twitter to be a very effective inbound marketing tool and the source of regular traffic for our sites, whilst we also use Facebook, Linkedin, Digg and more.

Today a new report has surfaced detailing the most effective ways for marketers to spread their message online. It covers the sharing trends and click-through rates on different social networking sites as well as email. It makes for interesting reading.

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