For better or for worse, Twitter is one of the pillar social media platforms that holds the attention of 330 million monthly active users of which 145 million are daily active users.
Every business owner should want to tap into such a vast ocean of potential customers, right?
Continue reading to learn why the answer to this question is not necessarily a resounding ‘Yes.’
5 Reasons why your business shouldn’t bother with Twitter
Twitter is not a search engine
One of the biggest problems of using Twitter as a content marketing channel is the fact that Twitter is not a search engine.
People don’t actively search Twitter to find solutions to their problems.
And if you don’t use hashtags in your tweets, they don’t even stand a theoretical chance of getting discovered down the line.
The life span of your tweets will be an hour or two and then they’ll go into oblivion.
And that’s assuming you have some followers like and retweet your tweets to keep them alive to that long.
For fresh accounts, Twitter is even less viable.
Twitter heavily skews towards male audiences
According to the latest data, Twitter consists of 70% male and 30% female audience.
Of course, this could be a good thing if your product is geared towards men.
You won’t care as much about this stat if your target audience is both men and women.
But if you have a product that’s heavily geared towards women, you should at the very least be aware of this unequal split.
In this case, Pinterest is a much better choice for your content marketing efforts than Twitter.
Low conversion rates
According to this study, Twitter conversion rates are just 0.5%.
For comparison, the same study shows that Google conversion rates are 1.9% and Facebook conversion rates are 1.2%.
Twitter’s low conversion rates are evidence that people usually aren’t in the state of spending when they’re on the platform.
This doesn’t mean it’s impossible to sell on Twitter nor that sales should always be the primary motivator of content marketing – because they absolutely shouldn’t.
Low conversion rates do, however, cast an unfavorable light on Twitter as a content marketing platform.
Twitter is increasingly becoming a platform for news and political discourse
71% of Twitter users say they use the network to get their news.
The nature of the Twitter feed makes it best suited for all types of news.
From world events and politics to entertainment and celebrity news.
Trying to sell on Twitter is an uphill battle simply because most people aren’t there to look for products most of the time.
Advertisers don’t see the value in advertising on Twitter
Twitter earned $2.25 billion in revenue from ads in 2019.
For comparison, Facebook earned $16.6 billion just in Q4 2018, and Google made over $134 billion from ads in 2019.
Of course, Twitter has a lot fewer users than Facebook (plus Instagram which is owned by Facebook) and Google, but not so much fewer to be dwarfed in ad revenue by that fact alone.
It appears that advertisers choose to spend a lot more money advertising on Facebook and Google than on Twitter.
Certainly, a noteworthy signal that advertisers prefer other platforms.
4 Reasons why your business should have a Twitter presence
You have content you can repurpose on Twitter
There are a few instances where Twitter might be worth your while.
One of them is when you are already creating content for other content marketing channels that you can easily repurpose on Twitter.
Repurposing content is a great way of getting the most out of your content creation efforts.
Just remember to add platform-specific relevancy to your posts.
That could be simply reformatting the images or videos to the best-suited format for the platform, or simply adding something like “Hey Twitter” at the beginning of your Tweets.
You can produce video content
There are over 2 billion video views on Twitter each day, which is 67% YoY growth according to Twitter’s internal data.
Video content does exceptionally well on Twitter compared to text or image content.
I created an entire article on Twitter video content statistics.
For example, tweets with video content get 10X more engagement than tweets without video.
Producing, and especially repurposing, video content on Twitter is one of the ways to maximize user engagement on the platform and making it useful for your business.
Your goal is to connect with industry peers
There can be many goals for your content marketing efforts.
One of them is building authority within your niche and connecting with industry peers.
Because Twitter has a wide audience, you can count on many of your industry peers already using the platform.
And they don’t even have to follow you for you to get on their radar.
You can always connect with them via DM’s or just by replying to their tweets.
Having a built-up Twitter profile with high-quality content will look good for your business once they inevitably check it out.
You want to build brand and increase brand awareness
Some businesses are at the stage where they can worry less about being a hundred percent time-efficient with their content marketing efforts in exchange for an omnichannel approach.
The omnichannel approach to content marketing entails publishing content and being present on all the major content marketing channels.
And Twitter with its hundreds of millions of users is certainly among them.
This approach is very useful when it comes to brand building and increasing brand awareness.
If your business is at the stage where you can afford to be slightly inefficient with your time, being present on Twitter will add to your branding efforts.
A word of caution – make sure to consistently publish content on all the channels you decide to use.
Neglecting or even abandoning one of your content marketing channels will negatively impact your branding.
What type of content performs best on Twitter?
Assuming you decided you want to continue and start publishing content on Twitter, it’s good to know what kind of content does well on that platform.
Videos
We’ve already mentioned videos as an excellent content type to post on Twitter.
There are a few reasons behind that claim:
- Video is the fastest-growing content type in marketing in general
- Video content creates more opportunities for your customers to see and hear something they’ll like about your business
- Video content, on average, gets more engagement from users
- You can pack more value in your Tweets when you use both text and video content at the same time
Images
Tweets with images get about 1.5X retweets than text-only tweets.
Tweets with images also get a higher click-through rate and more likes.
Apart from these benefits, some of the same things said about videos can be said for images as well.
They certainly make more impressions on the users and add to your branding efforts.
Lists
I’m not talking about Twitter Lists which are curated lists of Twitter accounts.
I’m talking about the good old lists like “5 best exercises for legs.”
Lists draw in more attention to themselves on Twitter feeds than the regular block of text people usually post.
They also typically provide more value and are more information-dense than regular tweets.
Statistics
Give your followers something interesting to engage with.
Mix it up with some stats from time to time.
Statistics are not only interesting but they also give you a chance to go viral and get noticed by industry peers.
Especially if you can provide statistics that came out of your own original research.
How often should you publish content on Twitter?
There are diminishing returns when posting too frequently in a single day on social media.
At some point, the algorithms throttle your organic reach and no one can see your posts.
One of the reasons for this is to combat spam.
However, Twitter has a much higher threshold than most other popular social media platforms.
In theory, you could post 20 or more times per day on Twitter and the algorithm wouldn’t mind.
Because Twitter is all about fast-paced bite-sized content, posting 5 times or more per day on it is perfectly fine.
In fact, you could easily post much more frequently than that and not get any objections from the algorithm.
To illustrate how OK Twitter is with their users posting a lot, the absolute maximum number of tweets allowed in the span of 24 hours is set to 2400.
What is the best time of the day and week to publish on Twitter?
As a rule of thumb, work and commute hours of your target audience is a great time of day to post on Twitter.
A lot of people are checking their phones when commuting, and, let’s face it, a lot of them are doing it during work hours as well.
The best days of the week to post on Twitter heavily depend on the type of content you’re posting.
In general, the entire workweek is a safe bet across most industries.
The exception to this is educational content that typically gets the most engagement on Saturdays.
Take all this with a grain of salt, however.
You can build a Twitter audience no matter when you’re active on the platform.
The substance of your tweets is much more important than the time they’re posted, anyway.
How to start on Twitter from scratch
Twitter, as one of the oldest still relevant social media platforms, has reached a point of maturity where the ratio of content published and the number of active users has leveled out.
In other words, there is no longer more demand for content than the amount of content that’s published on the platform.
This is the point when the algorithm usually starts cutting down on the organic reach it allows on the platform and starts favoring the established accounts and advertisers.
However, just because it’s harder to reach an audience organically, it doesn’t mean it’s impossible to build one.
When starting from scratch on a satiated social media platform like Twitter, you have to insert yourself into conversations and proactively put yourself in front of eyeballs.
You can do that by commenting on other people’s tweets and inserting yourself into conversations.
The best way to do that is visiting hashtags relevant to your business and start providing value by answering questions and helping solve their problems.
That, and being generally pleasant and, you’ve probably guessed it, social.
Be warned, building an audience from scratch this way on Twitter will be a grueling process and only you can be the judge of whether it’s worth your while or not.
Conclusion
To gauge whether Twitter is going to be worth your while try answering these three questions:
Do I have an established audience on Twitter?
Do I have an established audience on some other content channel I can bring on Twitter?
Am I creating content for other content marketing channels I can repurpose on Twitter?
If the answer to at least 2 out of the 3 questions is not ‘Yes,’ Twitter is probably not going to be worth the time investment.
A better move would be to try social media platforms that are currently experiencing much more organic growth such as LinkedIn and Tik Tok.