Interactive Marketing Blog

Today I was going through my blog archives when I realized that I haven’t written about Twitter much in the recent past. Not that there was dearth of any juicy news or any thoughts but it’s just that I didn’t want to add to pointless babble which most of us enthusiasts indulge into.

But today I read something quite interesting enough to again dabble into the twitter echo chamber; According the study conducted by Penn State in the US showed that about 20 percent of the tweets contained product information in the form of asking and providing information.

What it simply means is that users are directly commenting something about brands which actually gives companies a “rich source” of information concerning issues and questions that customers have regarding their products. Now that’s where I’ve always seen value in such interactive mediums.

It’s these large amount of brand data on Twitter which can pretty much provide any marketer with a sentiment map if he has to monitor and analyze tweets over time e.g.  what do your customers and non customers think about your product; what features are going down well / not so well or how are your competitors faring. Also, these tweets which are used to express reaction (both positive and negative) while they have engaged with some products and services are about as close as one can get to the customer point of purchase for products and services.

Now if you’re unsure of such research, then the research methodology seems quite fair enough to me at least. It was led by researchers like Jim Jansen, associate professor of information science and technology and Twitter chief scientist Abdur Chowdhury who looked at half a million tweets to conclude the 20 percent figure.

Though 20 percent figure might look paltry in the grand scheme of things, but assuming three million tweets a day, that would translate into 600k posts daily of direct relevance to brands.

Whoa! Now that’s a huge data set and considering that a single company can translate a fraction of that huge chunk of data into something more meaningful is a good bargain I consider since the cost related to such activity is nothing compared to the mega-budget companies consider for consumer insight research, product review or promotion per se. Though such mediums should always be considered with a punch of salt since not too many companies can take some outrageous backlash that many companies have suffered when they had opened the gates. But of course, on the contrary, I see more gain than loss if used purposely and effectively with right social media strategy.