Twitter Users Are Most Influential Online

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@AmeliaChen enjoys indulging in her penchant for all things social media, branding, and web design. Citizen of the web since 2000. In her free time, she designs paper goods, does social work and is trying to maintain a healthy diet.

Twitter is a useful platform to build a brand‘s reputation online – however, a brand isn’t only build by marketers themselves, but it also depends on how consumers perceive it to be.

Through user-generated content like tweets, blog posts, Facebook updates, conservations with friends and product reviews, consumers determine a large part of a brand’s image too.

Zooming in to Twitter, we’re glad that ExactTarget released their studies on how the micro-blogging site is changing marketing activities of companies. Findings show that…

• Twitter users are the most influential online consumers – 72 percent publish blog posts at least monthly, 70 percent comment on blogs, 61 percent write at least one product review monthly and 61 percent comment on news sites.

• Daily Twitter users are 6 times more likely to publish articles, five times more likely to post blogs, seven times more likely to post to Wikis and three times more likely to post product reviews at least monthly compared to non-Twitter users.

• 23 percent of online consumers read Twitter updates at least monthly. 11 percent of online consumers read Twitter updates, but do not have a Twitter account themselves.

• 20 percent of consumers indicate they have followed a brand in order to interact with the company – more than become email subscribers or Facebook fans for the sake of interaction.

• Men are more than twice as likely as women to follow brands on Twitter to interact with the company (29 percent compared to 13 percent).

What does this mean for marketers?

Twitter provides countless opportunities for businesses to interact with customers first hand, and even tap on influential users who can create an even bigger impact for their brand.

Is mass media still the best medium these days? Well, it still plays a huge role in PR and advertising but with the rise of digital communication platforms, its power has slowly shifted. There isn’t a best. It depends how we use each platform to its fullest potential.

And this quote sums it up pretty well: “Today, everybody is media.”