Is it time to give Twitter the bird?

Twitter is an American micro-blogging and social networking platform, with over 397 million users worldwide, in which users post and interact with messages referred to as ‘tweets’. In one article, Ben Thompson, a strategic marketing writer, argued that the cultural impact Twitter has had on the world has been vastly significant. Filling the gap left by Facebook in the creation of news, and just as essentially, voicing an elite opinion and forming narratives. This impact significantly outweighs Twitter’s financial performance. In Q3 of 2021, Twitter’s $1.28 billion in revenue amounted to just 4.4% of Facebook’s $29 billion, and a case could be made for Twitter’s impact on the world, at its’ peak, being just as great as Facebook’s.

For businesses, the platform provides a fast, less intrusive form of advertising that can be seen when the audience wants to see it. Twitter is a unique and effective platform when being used well. The ability to reach a wide audience, deliver customer service, voice your brand identity, and demonstrate your expertise, in addition to gaining quick feedback and the platform being free, makes Twitter a very useful tool for marketers to utilise. Twitter Ads, the paid promotion tool on the platform, allows businesses to build and optimise their paid campaigns to meet certain objectives, such as engagement, impressions, and cost-per-result, often achieving greater results than organic posts.

The platform can be somewhat limited in terms of producing content, the regular introduction and removal of new tools and themes mean Twitter lacks consistency, this is reflected in the fluctuation of figures that businesses are receiving from their posts. The 280-character limit on tweets offers little scope for error and may require time to learn how to ‘tweet’ effectively. Time is also essential for Twitter, maintaining a presence takes a time commitment, in addition to training staff to have the necessary skills. The timing of tweets massively impacts the metrics that businesses use to analyse their performance on the platform, an hour can make the difference between a successful or an unsuccessful post.

The fall of Twitter over recent years can be partially credited to the pandemic. Thompson suggested that the surge in online retail caused by the pandemic was powered by direct response marketing, providing a great boost for many ad-driven platforms. Twitter had struggled to build a direct response model over the years, leaving the platform overly reliant on brand advertising for its ad revenue, with 85% coming this way. This decline has been evidenced by the change in the top social platforms that businesses used in 2020 in comparison to 2021. In 2020, Twitter ranked a respectable 4th, behind the giants of Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. However, 2021 told a different story, with Twitter falling to 6th place, losing ground to Tik Tok and YouTube/Google Ads. This reflects the continued rise of visual-based platforms. Instagram’s rise, for example, coincided with higher quality mobile phone cameras, more data in contracts, and larger phone screens, while Twitter has largely focused only on text-based content and has only dipped its toe in the visual-based content space.

In a nutshell, Twitter is great when you get it right, but it shouldn’t be the quintessential element of your marketing strategy. Being too reliant and desperately aiming to hit KPIs may leave you underwhelmed by the platform. Twitter is minute compared to the META platforms (Facebook and Instagram) and LinkedIn, therefore shouldn’t be assessed as like them. Instead, utilise the platform for creative, off-the-cuff content aiming for engagement over other metrics and use the platform for communicating your brand’s personality to a wider audience.

Written by Corey Hammond