Twitter: Pros & Cons

With an audience of over 305 million users worldwide, Twitter is defiantly a leading social network. However, businesses and users often feel overwhelmed when it comes to figuring out how to effectively utilize Twitter to build their brand or distribute targeted content.

It can be argued that the excessive use of hashtags and symbols leaves many baffled on what they should use when sending out a tweet.

In this post, I discuss just a few of the pros and cons of Twitter when it comes to brand building and content distribution.

Pros

Massive Audience

You can communicate to a large audience. Using its filters, you can narrow down your target audience to a specific demographic or geography.

If you’re running a large or small business, Twitter is ideal to communicate with consumers and maintain an engaging online presence. Twitter can help you carve out a niche for your brand, and find your own target audience. The use of a hashtag (#) with your business name behind it can help you better organize information about your business and provides users with a focused way to find your business.

Tweets May Be Short, But They Can Be Twice as Effective as Long Write-ups

Tweets are not only easier to create and manage, but are also amazingly effective at creating a hype on social media. The attention span of most people is only a few seconds and the average person reads around 300 words per minute. Thus, making the 140 character tweet something that can be consumed very quickly. However, its important to keep them simple and engaging if you want consumers to stay connected to your business or brand.

You Pay Only for Engagement

The pay-for-engagement-only policy of Twitter ensures that you only pay for the adverts that are effectively getting across to your targeted audience.

Hence, unlike other media platforms including Facebook, you do not have to spend a fixed amount of money to activate your social media ads regardless of whether they are garnering any response from your audience.

Cons

SPAM and Noise

Depending on who you follow, you could receive hundreds of tweets per hour, even thousands per day, many times with content or information that you are really not that interested in. So, you IGNORE or DELETE it. This is known as Social Network fatigue.

Tweets Tend to Get Lost

On an average day there are about 303 million tweets tweets sent, and if each user follows hundreds or more profiles, the potential for your brand’s140 character tweet to get lost, is pretty ASTRONOMICAL.

Tweets Don’t Live Long

The average lifespan of a tweet is around 18 minutes. To get your engaging message down to 140 characters often takes a lot longer than that amount of time.

Connections Not Very Deep

Just because you follow someone on Twitter doesn’t mean you like everything they have to say. It’s harder to find truly like minded individuals on Twitter unless you do a ton of hunting to find them. That means you have to go through a lot of social noise to find what you’re really looking for. So, most of the time you have low value connections.

Content and Connections Up To You

You must search for the connections you want. There’s no easy way for the content and connections you want to easily find you, leaving you to search through the over 305 million users, in order to find like minded people or content that is of high value. Thus leaving you feeling social network fatigue.

Twitter is Not the Place for Pictures and Images

If you run a photography business, or any other business that requires you to share a great deal of pictures, Twitter is not the ideal place for you.

Unlike Instagram, Snapchat and Pinterest, Twitter largely revolves around the written word. Even though you can attach links to your photos and potentially get engaging responses, your followers may not find it enjoyable to view pictures on Twitter.

Not a Person of Few Words?

Most people find it difficult to make their point, or express themselves in a few words. Twitter’s word-limit of 140 characters forces brands to compromise creativity, and get straight to the point.

Coming up with engaging and precise, effective tweets can be quite challenging. Writing a tweet and posting it is one thing, but to create a re-tweeting sensation, it needs to be truly creative and engaging content.

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