Twitter’s B2B Value



2009 February, 26th
Mihaela Lica
Mihaela Lica
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Phil Butler once called Twitter a marketing convention on wheels and recent reports show that over half of the Twitter users use the site for business related purposes.

But the named reports are based on a survey made on 700 people, which doesn’t even represent 1% of the actual user number of the network. Can we trust its findings?

Well, if the social media guru says so…

Rodney Rumford of thinks that 700 people are enough to define a trend.

There’s no secret that Twitter is used by business to advertise, even Barack Obama had a very active Twitter campaign during the elections, and his Twitter activity ceased the minute he won. What stuns me is the fact that, although Rumford acknowledges the B2B value of Twitter, he forgets one thing: advertising on Twitter is like selling to sellers. He says 56% of the users are there for business, I dare to say that the number is higher. 80% is closer to what I experience lurking around the community. I don’t need a survey to tell me that people use Twitter to market themselves: their actions are enough.

Unlike big brands, the little businesses use Twitter with certain “finesse” – the self marketing is not obvious.

Rumford notes that Twitter can be used actively or passively. A “passive” user is a “listener” (call the passive a lurker, they’ve always been around) and an “active” user needs to handle marketing with care, to avoid the risk of alienating consumers.

Twitter is also a place where reputations can be discussed and scrutinized. When the users say something bad about a company, it is time for customer service intervention: “people are going to be saying bad stuff about your brand, and that’s OK.” Unfortunately, if the customer service intervention does not take place in real time – Twitter is a live lifestreaming platform – late responses often prove pointless or even dangerous. Pointless is a fortunate scenario: they usually go unnoticed. Dangerous… well, if they add straws to the fire, than yes. It’s an art to manage a conversation when the space designated for it is sometimes less than 140 characters including spaces.

About the Author

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Mihaela Lica is senior partner at Pamil Visions PR and editor at Everything PR. She is a widely cited authority on search engine optimization and public relations issues (BBC News, Force for Good, Reuters and others), with an experience of over 7 years in online PR and SEO. Mihaela writes for SitePoint, Search Engine Journal, and other online publications. She also maintains a personal blog called eWritings. Follow Mig on Twitter or send her an email at mig [at] pamil-visions [dot] com.

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