Twitter: Have businesses taken advantage?

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ANALYSIS: This week sees Twitter celebrate its fifth birthday.

The microblogging site has grown from a tiny San Francisco start up to one of the most influential websites on the internet.

But, whilst the consumer usage has been well documented, businesses are just beginning to jump on the Twitter train, with varying degrees of success.

We take a look at whether Twitter is a good pursuit for companies to follow and if those using it are doing so to the best of their ability.

What are the pros?

No-one can argue Twitter doesn’t give you a huge audience. With estimates of over 200 million registered users signed up to the service, 460,000 accounts being activated each day and 140 million tweets sent every 24 hours, there are clearly captivated consumers.

But what are the benefits for businesses?

“Increasingly we see organisations wanting to use it in a business context, not just from a social perspective,” claimed Jonathan Rowley, director of Microsoft Dynamics CRM at Avanade.

Talking to IT PRO, he outlined two main ways Twitter was great for companies to use.

“One is marketing their products and services,” said Rowley. “We are working with a ledger organisation that runs bars in London and they want to use Twitter to target happy hours to certain consumers when they are in the areas of their bars.”

However, the second and more important aspect was having a conversation with those customers who use the products and/or services.

“It is having a dialogue as people have given up on the phone to a large extent [and] email has now got to the point that you can’t respond quickly enough,” he added.

“Twitter is that new tool and that new conversation.”

There were also benefits to businesses where they could reach out to new audiences in a very small time frame.

Rob Bamforth, principal analyst at Quocirca, told IT PRO: “It reaches a particular audience type who might be harder to reach through other media.”

“In theory, this is the new younger digital generation, but, in practice, it might be anybody of any age who is actually just used to using a particular media and maybe likes the relative anonymity of online media versus making a phone call or writing a letter.”

He added: “I think it does allow people to communicate using a medium they might be more comfortable with but [admittedly] email also falls into a similar category.”

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