Twitter Users Aren’t Interested in Supporting Your Brand

Bad news, Evil Corporations: Twitter tweeps aren’t your shills! A study by digital marketing agency 360i  reveals that only a sliver of consumer tweets forward branding messages. It notes that “more than 90-percent of tweets originate from consumers — and only 8-percent are authored by marketers.” Conversely, only 12-percent of all tweets mention a brand. (Click here for the full PDF report.)

When tweets do mention a brand, they’re usually talking about digital culture, with the top five mentions being Twitter itself, Apple, Google, YouTube and Microsoft. Those brand mentions are usually informational in nature (e.g., “French Politicians Ban Twitter From Heated Legislative Debate“), or about using the brand in question, while about “one-fifth of tweets mentioning brands demonstrate an outward opinion of the brand.”

360i notes that a scant 1-percent of tweets that mention brands are actually in conversation with the brand itself, despite the direct nature of the network. A few brands, such as Starbucks and Disney, have been successfully engaging their followers, however. (And the report fails to mention the very recent Old Spice campaign that utilized both Twitter and YouTube, and resulted in a doubling of sales in the last month.)

For most marketers, though, this is a sad state of affairs. 360i suggests that they need to create “an ongoing dialogue with consumers that enables brands to become a more meaningful part of people’s everyday lives.” For all you non-commercial tweeps, keep up the good work! You pose a true challenge for companies that would seek to exploit your mind-numbing updates for the promise of consumer loyalty.