Twitter For Business

Delivering instant public messages right into the hands of a target audience seems like a potent form of branding. But is Twitter marketing every marketer’s dream, or is it a potential minefield? Vaishali Sharma explores. According to 2018 statistics, Twitter has 330 million active users who send 500 million tweets a day, 80 percent of which is on mobile. The social media platform can store 18 quintillion accounts. That’s a lot of data! For marketers, data translates to bigger and better business. Once data is collected and properly analyzed, it can be strategically utilized for specific marketing campaigns to more effectively reach a target market. Social media sites like Facebook and LinkedIn allow users to directly contact businesses however Twitter follows a “direct conversation, direct resolution” approach. The real estate industry has taken to Twitter in their digital marketing strategies. The companies use the platform to interact with their audience, discuss questions from their audience and ‘Retweet’the tweets. Some even run contests with hash tags. Twitter is used by businesses to reply to users’ complaints and demands, creating a constructive communication process.Consumers can connect and exchange opinions, receive first-hand information and discover the latest launches in the industry, thereby allowing businesses to build brand awareness and provide timely customer service to clients. Twitter benefits both the business and the client – the client is able to contact the business regarding their needs, opinions and complaints while the businesses can connect with their clientele and potential TG to promote sales and cater to their complaints and demands. Twitter has led to the development of a personal approach between businesses and clients. Twitter is good for connecting different users together but, it does come with its own equal downside of certain lack of reliability. But along with its benefits, Twitter (being anopen platform) does not guarantee any credibility of stories. People often use such open forums to defame or misinform people, producing fake/misguiding information. Although Twitter is originally defined as a medium for social connection between developers and buyers, however people (or trolls) have been frequently misusing it. It often becomes difficult to distinguish between the genuine and fake side of a story produced on social media. People often publish stories for their own personal benefits, reducing the reliability of the medium. Twitter, has recently come up with a new initiative to combat online trolls by examining users’ “behavioural signals”. “The new approach looks at behavioural patterns of users in addition to the content of tweets, allowing Twitter to find and mute online bullies and trolls. Even if the offending tweets are not a violation of Twitter policy, they may be hidden from users if they are deemed to “distort” the conversation,” Twitter said. This “safety” initiative by Twitter aims to filter out offensive speech while still maintaining its “open-platform” status. Twitter plans to observe behaviour of people who tweet to accounts which are not following them and accounts which do not have confirmed E-mail addresses. Twitter notes that too much trolling and abusive comments are driving people off of Twitter. The company has taken action against some of the accounts that violate Twitter policies for distorting the conversation but the challenge lies in addressing the disruptive behaviour that do not violate its policies but negatively impact the health of the conversation. Such disruptive content is not deleted but only shown when a user clicks on ‘show more replies’.Twitter said its test of this approach has showed a 4 per cent drop in abuse reports from search and 8 per cent in abuse reports from conversations.