Last updated - November 10, 2023
Twitter is one of the biggest social platforms in the modern day. With more than 400 million active users, this platform can be a game-changer for any business looking to maximize its customer reach. On Twitter, brands can mass-market products to their niche audience using smart demographics.
According to statistics, every Twitter user is worth at least $110, with every visitor going to a website through Twitter estimated to be worth $62.
52% of Twitter users have bought products they saw on the platform, with more than 80% of them saying that they think Twitter is more influential on their purchasing decision compared to tv or other ads.
While Twitter presents an excellent opportunity for business to market their products, there are also downsides to using the platform for business. This article highlights the benefits and disadvantages of using Twitter for business to help you determine whether it is the best social platform for your business.
The advantages of using Twitter for business
Saving time – create and schedule a good tweet
Twitter is the easiest way to get information out to your target audience. Crafting a tweet is easy and can get your message out without delays. You can save time by scheduling your tweets to ensure your content goes out at the best time to engage more followers.
Tweet scheduling is especially ideal if you find it hard to set time aside in your day to tweet fresh content. Content scheduling ensures your page has consistent content to ensure productivity, increased engagement, and consistency.
Reach a worldwide audience
With millions of daily active users, Twitter is a powerful tool for any brand looking to raise awareness and engage with a larger customer base. This is especially ideal for small and medium-size companies looking for an affordable way of reaching their target market.
Twitter gives you the chance to connect with a diverse fan base of potential followers from different parts of the world. This can significantly extend the reach of any business beyond their local area or even country.
On Twitter, businesses can search for users who march their client profile and tailor their marketing tweets directly for this demographic. For instance, a business dealing with designer bags can start following users who are enthusiastic about fashion and start tweeting about their line of handbags, latest handbag trends, upcoming trends, and even fashion exhibitions to attract the attention of this target market.
Advertise your webpage
Twitter is one of the best platforms to drive traffic to web pages. The best part is that you do not need to pay to get clicks to the webpage. You can use the Twitter marketing system to generate thousands of clicks to your webpage in a short time.
To ensure you capture the attention of your target audience, you should focus on creating at least ten tweets a day on your page to create content awareness and visibility. The more you tweet, the more clicks you generate for your webpage.
You can use a local SEO guide to ensure your tweets are optimized for SEO, which is essential when ranking and optimizing your webpage. Also, make sure your target webpage is always available, so your Twitter clicks wouldn’t go in vain and decrease visitors’ satisfaction.
Track data easily
Using Twitter for your business allows you to track data and use Twitter analytics to grow a business. With Twitter analytics, you can easily learn the impact your tweets have on your business. You can determine which tweets get the most organic traffic and start to notice trends. Now it’s possible to have voice tweets. With this data, you can refine your content only to offer what your target market responds to.
Twitter analytics also helps you track views on videos and even access data about how your target audience responds to your video content. This way, you can offer better content. Twitter analytics can also be used to determine your spending. Since promoting every tweet can be expensive, Twitter analytics can give you an idea of the best tweets to promote for improved engagement or visibility.
Customer support and feedback
Leading brands see Twitter as a vital medium for marketing, market research, and customer care that can provide valuable data on different aspects of a business. Rightfully so, customers can easily reach different brands on the platform to get help or offer feedback. Most customers find Twitter to be the easiest medium for getting help or assistance.
Brands can use Twitter to get feedback on their products or services and use this information to improve their product and customer experience. Leading companies set up dedicated Twitter accounts where customers can get customer support in different languages from anywhere in the world. These accounts are also used to get feedback from customers. This makes Twitter one of the best platforms for delivering excellent customer support and generating user feedback.
The disadvantages of using Twitter for business
Hard to build a following
Even with millions of daily active users, Twitter is one of the toughest platforms to build a following. Most businesses enjoying the benefits of using Twitter for business have taken years to build brand recognition.
If you are a new business, your goal should be building a niche community for your brand, which will work as the foundation for building business relations with your audience. It will take time to gain traction, which is sometimes a time investment businesses are unwilling to make.
Limitations
Posting Limits
Twitter comes with a character limit for each tweet of 140 characters. You will be forced to omit a lot of details in your tweet, including using links to your website to construct a fitting tweet.
The only way to post company-related content without omitting important info is by creating threads to get long messages across.
Also, even though it is possible to post pictures on Twitter, there are limitations when it comes to video content. It is not possible to tweet actual videos from web services or upload them from desktop software. Users can only post YouTube links to videos.
Follower limitations
Unlike other platforms that allow businesses to have millions of followers, Twitter limits the number of accounts a user can follow to 2000. This means that companies can easily be locked out of their target audience if the targeted users reach their follow limit.
Beware of spam
While Twitter gives you access to millions of users every day, it can also become dangerous for your business if you deliver tweets that amount to spam. Twitter followers can easily recognize a brand that is only out to sell products or services. This can quickly be used to form an idea about your business, which can be difficult to come back from if users do not like your approach.
On the flip side, Twitter also has a small percentage of users who are spammers, which can make it difficult for your brand to enjoy genuine engagement with followers by spamming your comments section.
Buried Tweets
According to Twitter statistics, more than 500 million tweets are sent out per day, and 200 billion per year. With new tweets coming up every second, business tweets can get buried quickly and even go unseen.
The thing about Twitter is that your followers probably follow hundreds of other accounts of interest to them. While your tweets will show up on your followers’ feed, you cannot be sure whether the person will interact with the tweet. This is why it is essential to ensure your tweets are highly tailored to the needs of your followers to improve the chances of getting user engagement.
Wrapping it up
Twitter for business comes with a lot of benefits that make it an attractive marketing platform for modern brands. However, some pitfalls cannot be ignored by a brand looking to maximize the platform’s potential. Like any other marketing platform, your brand visibility and engagement are only as good as the effort you put behind the scenes. With dedication and patience, a brand can benefit from using Twitter for business.
