It shouldn’t be a surprise to any Internet marketing service specialist that by now most Fortune 100 companies have registered Twitter accounts. But according to a study released yesterday by PR firm Weber Shandwick, the majority of those companies aren’t using Twitter as effectively as they could. According to their study (PDF), 73 of the 100 companies that sit at the top of the Fortune list use Twitter, but most aren’t tweeting often enough, most aren’t engaging customers, and most aren’t letting their company’s personality come through in their tweets.
This is a case study that all Internet marketing service specialists will want to take a look at, since it seems to highlight the difficulties that all companies, not just the largest, are having with using Twitter. The result is low engagement from followers. In fact, 15 percent of accounts registered by Fortune 100 companies didn’t have any followers at all.
The leading reason for this, as any effective Internet marketing service will tell you, is that there probably isn’t any personality coming through in those tweets. And that’s just what the Weber Shandwick study found. According to the report, 53 percent of the Twitter accounts “did not display personality, tone or voice on their account pages.” That means that the Twitter account didn’t have anything that could be seen as a “real person” behind the it. The way to creare an engaging account is to convince people that the tweets are being produced by an live person, an actual human being.
Another incisive fact from an Internet marketing service perspective is that the companies weren’t tweeting enough. While it’s not necessary for a company to tweet every hour, a troubling 76 percent of Fortune 100 accounts had fewer than 500 posted tweets. If the companies were really trying to engage as many customers as they can, then the tweet count should be much higher. Fewer tweets means less of an online impact.
The Internet marketing service study found that most companies felt comfortable using Twitter as a company news feed. But they haven’t always used the best tactics to gain and keep followers. Only 16 percent of companies use Twitter to alert customers of sales and special offers for Twitter users.
So what’s the solution? A change in strategy will go a long way to remedy these issues. The most important Internet marketing service missing from these accounts is conversation. Twitter works best as a communication application. That means that the best results will be gained from companies that use Twitter to interact with their customers and followers.
