To Tweet or not To Tweet??

 SM Experiment - Observations Pt 2 (final - I'm bored already!!)

Ok so the second part of my experiment didn't quite go to plan. Why? Because I had absolutely no idea what to tweet!!

I tried easing into it with a retweet and then followed it up with a "what I ate for breakfast" type tweet... and then nothing.

I considered using it to have a go at Officework's Same Day delivery policy until I reliased the order was placed at 11.34 and their cut off time is 11.30am (sorry Officework's call centre guy...)

In desperation I even considered replying to one of @Coca-Cola's "What made you smile today?" posts, but then quickly came to my senses.

I thought my experiment had failed miserably until I realised - perhaps I'm not alone. Perhaps people aren't using Twitter to tell everyone about what they had for breakfast and sure there are people who respond to @Coca-Cola and @Red Bull's post but are they just a minority? So perhaps the real question I'm supposed to answer is How do people use Twitter?

Here in bullet points is some of the info I found (from various sources) to help answer this question.

• Twitter has 500M registered users but only 200M are active
• 40% of users don't actually tweet, they just use it to follow what's going on in this big crazy world of ours - told you I'm not alone
• 36% tweet at least once per day, with an average visit time of 11:50 minutes
• Only 8% of all adult(18-65)internet users use Twitter on a typical day
• One in five smartphone owners (20%)are Twitter users, with 13% using the service on a typical day
• 55% of all Twitter users use the service to share links to news stories, and 53% retweet others
• 92% of retweets are based on “interesting content.” Only 26% are due to inclusion of “please RT!” in the tweet

So what does this mean for marketers??? Well just my opinion, but I tend to think marketers should leave the engagement/conversational stuff to the likes of Facebook and use Twitter as more of a support/broadcast medium. But use those 140 characters to their maximum potential to encourage users to want to follow you, to increase the chances of the message being retweeted and to lead them to wherever it is you want them to go (e-commerce site, instagram, facebook etc.)

What do you think?