For businesses the idea of advertising to those on twitter is an appealing one. The large number of people on Twitter means that companies looking to advertise are certain to reach many people. Twitter have sought to take advantage of this market by advertising their space at a premium to businesses. But how useful is Twitter for Business?
What tools are included with Twitter for Business?
So what are the features that Twitter for Business hope to sell to companies hoping to raise revenue? The premium service provides businesses with the tools to design tools to market individuals and to target specific groups, as well as the ability place advertisements designed for particular audiences. Businesses can also target trending topics that are receiving the most attention on twitter with advertisement designed to appeal specially to them.
Another particularly useful tool is that it is able to monitor sentiment and feeling of people towards the advertisement. It can also provide companies with statistics about how many people are clicking and responding to the adverts posted. Twitter for Business also provides smaller businesses with basic features and analysis, so it is not just the larger companies that can take advantage of it.
Are there any disadvantages in Twitter for Business?
However there are particular disadvantages in using Twitter for Business. For instance, few people actually respond to the adverts placed on twitter. The use of the tools provided by twitter are also quite expensive and possible difficult for smaller companies to afford. Companies would have to analyse whether advertising in such a way is cost effective and actually providing them with improved sales results.
Also there are sociological reasons why it might be less useful to companies than conventional advertising. Twitter users are not using Twitter to be advertised to by different companies. There is a possibility that people would be at best indifferent to the advertisements. At worst, they’d resent the fact that companies are trying to manipulate their interests to sell them things. More conventional means of advertisement such as TV promotions and to a lesser extent advertisements in newspapers are still more likely to be received by a larger audience of people, albeit in a significantly less targeted manner.
So, how useful is Twitter for Business?
One of the features that is most appealing is that Twitter for Business can target particular social and cultural events. So for twitter followers following big events on twitter, the ads could have quite an effect. For Twitter for Business to be more successful, Twitter would need to place more emphasis on different adverts. Facebook for instance monitors your activity and your interests and targets you very personally in a way that Twitter attempts to do but in my view fails at. Instead of them looking like ordinary tweets, there is a better way needed to catch the eye of the consumer.
While the individual users would prefer that Twitter remains ad-free, companies will continue to take advantage of Twitter for Business. As more businesses start to use it, the increase in the number of adverts on the twitter sphere will make it much more successful.
Content Assistant – Tim Sykes – @timsykes3
Edited October 2020
