Tag Archives: Twitter

Millions of users don’t a customer make, nor a profit, or even a business…

19 Tuesday May 2015

Posted by in Advertising, Branding, Digital, Digital marketing, Marketing, Social Media

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As those who lived through the first dot.con bubble know, the way to make money was to come up with an idea and con “investors” to throw buckets of cash at this amazing new e-thing. Nobody worried about making money because amazingly in the e-world, profits miraculously appear down the track.

And we all know how the dot.con bubble ended don’t we?

FB-bubble

It’s the same principle driving many of the “start-ups” today. Same process – just a funky new buzzword for launching a risky business. How lame does it sound to say you’re opening a new company? It’s much cooler to say you’re launching a “digital start-up“.

You carry even more swag if you are “crowdfunding” or “crowdsourcing” your start-up – WOW, just writing it has an aphrodisiac effect!

CF-2

But just as they did in 1999, the start-up owners have no plan to turn a profit any time soon, except from selling part of the start-up shares to investors. Many of these ‘business models’ are based on getting lots of users of free platforms – think Twitter, Yelp, LinkedIn et al.

The money will be made down the track by selling advertising based on the volume of users. Just like magazines and newspapers did for centuries. Although people have always paid a cover price for most print publications. But as news is now free online, paid publications are struggling.

your_ad_here_banner

The mistake here of course, is to believe users behave like customers and regularly return to shop. Therefore advertisers will be willing to pay to reach these users when they return.

The world doesn’t need any more “opportunities” in which to advertise. So why do these digi-people believe advertisers should make them rich? Why not create something of worth that people will buy? After all, most of their users would not pay for these social platforms if they cost money. One of the major reasons people use them is simply because the service is free.

And financial analysts are now rethinking some of these user-based businesses. On 30th April they took a dim view of the user-based platforms Twitter, Yelp and LinkedIn:

  • Twitter share price dropped 25+%
  • Yelp dropped 23+%
  • LinkedIn dropped 20+%

Read about it here.

As a result, marketing blogger Mark Kolier questioned Twitter’s value as a marketing channel: “What if Twitter isn’t an effective marketing platform?“.

So I ask the question:

Is Twitter the next Myspace?

As regular readers know, Twitter is failing to attract brands in significant numbers. Looking at how it is being used, I suspect it will go the way of Myspace – becoming a niche player. In Twitter’s case a service for vacuous celebrities; movie, TV, music and sports stars/shows; emergency services; journalists; public relations executives; government services; the odd data consultancy and some customer service departments.

Twitter probably won’t survive as a marketing channel for brands – particularly as it still hasn’t made it as one. It is a reasonable channel for individual consultants and publishers to promote themselves, but not for major brands.

You may disagree dear reader – but unless Twitter can become more relevant to big brand marketers and grab more revenue in a crowded advertising market, dominated by Google and Facebook, its future may not be in its own hands.

Lots of users, not lots of business.

twitter fail

And you can retweet me on that…

Consumer brands virtually absent from Facebook and Instagram Top 100

07 Tuesday Apr 2015

Posted by in Content Marketing, Digital, Digital marketing, Social Media

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Last week I explained the numbers behind Twitter users, based on available information online.

Each month I take a cursory look into the top couple of hundred social media sites to see if consumer brands are making any inroads. And each month nothing surprises, as not much really changes.

binoculars_convergys 304

The one thing it does reinforce is that the most popular sport in the world is, and always will be, people watching. It seems our fascination with celebrity is insatiable. And it’s why social media will primarily be a social channel rather than a business channel for consumer brands.

Instagram is not as easy to categorise as Facebook or Twitter, as there are accounts that are not always easy to define. Some describe themselves as actors and models, or actors and musicians, or TV stars and models, so I may have put one or two in categories that don’t represent their primary skill – so to speak.

Here’s the most recent summary of the Top 100 Instagram accounts. The only international consumer brand is Victoria Secrets – which I suspect has lots of young male followers who aren’t really customers. There is also a huge bias to American accounts.

The training videos refer to bloggers of nail polish and make-up application lessons. The top account in Instagram is Instagram itself with 65+ million followers, while the second highest is Justin Bieber with 23+ million. The 100th account has 4+ million followers:

  • Musicians – 28
  • Actors – 18
  • Vacuous celebrities – 13
  • Models – 11
  • Sportspeople – 9
  • Sports clubs/brands – 7
  • Social media brands – 4
  • Fashion retailers – 4
  • Training videos – 3
  • Magazines – 2
  • TV Shows – 1

Here’s the latest list of Top 100 Facebook accounts. The top 3 accounts are Facebook accounts with 534 million+ down to 161 million+ followers. The next is Cristiano Rinaldo with 102 million+, while the 100th account is the TV show The Big Bang Theory with 32 million+ followers.

Interestingly there are two accounts of dead people – Michael Jackson and Bob Marley. And Bob died before the internet was invented.

There are only 7 consumer brands in the Top 100 – apart from Red Bull, they are all American global brands that have spent $millions on their accounts: McDonald’s, KFC, Oreo, Pepsi, Starbucks, Walmart and Red Bull.

  • Musicians – 39
  • TV Shows – 13
  • Sportspeople – 9
  • Intanet/social media brands – 8
  • Actors/Celebrities – 9
  • Movies – 8
  • Consumer brands – 7
  • Sports clubs/brands – 6
  • Politicians – 1

Here’s links to the Instagram and Facebook resources.

The concern of course, is for the future of marketing. Global brands have a collective marketing budget of $billions and thousands of degree-qualified marketing staff to do their bidding. Yet only 7 brands are in the Top 100 FB accounts and handful of lingerie/fashion brands are in the Top 100 Instagram accounts.

Yet the musicians, celebrities, actors, models and the like, generally have minimal marketing budgets, a PR Manager and maybe a handful of marketing staff. But they dominate the Top 100 social media accounts.

$_20

If they can dominate the social media space with comparatively minimal marketing support – what does it say about the skills required for the future marketer? After all, you can fail Year 10 at high school and easily be a social media manager – there are no skills/qualifications required to Tweet or post images to a social site.

Social media management continues to be the new industrial age job function – unskilled labour, doing mindless repetitive tasks at a machine – tweet, retweet, hashtag, upload, Like, tweet, retweet, hashtag, upload, Like, repeat infinitum…

typists

unskilled labor dominates social media employment…

I’m off to teach advertising strategy at university tonight – might have to revise the notes…

 

Brands are absent from Top 100 social sites…

20 Friday Jun 2014

Posted by in Branding, Marketing, Social Media

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Top100img

Each month I check the movement of the top social media sites to see if there’s anything enlightening.

Only this year have brands finally started to appear in the Top 100. Until a few months ago Coca Cola was the only “brand” to make the FB list. The list was dominated by musicians, actors and vacuous celebrities.

The World Cup has created an increase in football players and clubs making the Top 100 FB and Twitter accounts.

Given the amount of industry focus on social media, it is fascinating how few brands make the Top 100 lists. There are 11 in the FB list and none in Twitter. And those brands that do make the list have spent tens of millions of dollars to do so – Coca Cola, Red Bull, Converse (2 sites), Nike, Starbucks, Pepsi, Oreo, KFC, McDonald’s and Walmart.

Whereas the celebrities, musicians and actors have invested very little by comparison. If the biggest brands on the planet with their massive budgets, struggle to make social media work, what chance do most other brands and businesses have in social world?

It’s no wonder so many business executives are cynical about social media. As Associate Professor Mark Ritson says; “social media is about people it’s not about brands“.

As I’ve said before; “there’s a reason it’s called social media, not business media“. Most marketers need to invest a large part of their budget to get social media to work profitably, if at all. That’s not to say you cannot get a positive ROI on social media, but it’s not easy to do so.

And it’s not surprising that people are more interested in Cristiano Rinaldo, Shakira or even dead musicians, than they are in Walmart or McDonald’s. It’s human nature. After all, the world’s biggest sport is people watching. And this may come as a shock to some, but people don’t want brand relationships. Scary hey?

ronaldo

Here’s the lists at today’s date from Fanpagelist and twittercounter:

Account Type                    Facebook             Twitter

Musician/Actor                         47                   63

TV Show/Movie                       19                     9

Football club/player                  7                    10

Social media site                      8                      8

Games                                    5                       0

Vacuous celebrities                  0                     5

Dead musicians                       2                     0

Leaders/Politicians                   1                    5

Brands                                   11                    0

Total                                     100                  100

Hmm, I wonder what the Kardashians are up to today…

facebook thumbs down

Twitter, why would you bother? #retweet…

25 Monday Nov 2013

Posted by in BIG DATA, Content Marketing, Customer Service, Digital, Marketing, Marketing Automation, Social Media

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Twitter is one of those digital things that creates a great divide within business people and the general population. On a ratio of roughly 99 to 1, the comments I hear about Twitter are against using it – “why bother” or “why should I waste my time?” or “I just don’t get it“.

I rarely hear or read why it is worthwhile following Twits or being followed. Certainly the eBooks and Twitter experts rarely discuss the cost to tweet or the financial benefit. They just focus on tweeting for tweeting’s sake.

In fact, nobody I know in business has given a good argument for its use, yet I know many people who use it to some degree. This blog is automatically linked to Twitter, but I gave up using my Twitter account months ago due to the overwhelming amount of spam.

I get hundreds of fake posts daily from people/names I’ve never followed. I changed my password a number of times, but over 90% of the feeds in my account are spam. So I just don’t look at it, as my time is worth more doing things other than sorting through tweets.

Here’s a screen shot from today for example – I have no idea who this Twit is:

Twitter screen shot

Once again the DIY weakness of the internet. People have to sort out every digital glitch themselves, from email problems, to pages not loading, to spam in everything. Most suppliers of digital technology avoid providing customer service in the form of humans on the phone to help users. They force users to solve it themselves online via FAQ,s alleged help sections on sites, and in some cases live chat. And this DIY help takes so much time it’s often easier to stop being a user.

13 countries account for 74% of users

This infographic – I had to drop in a marketing buzzword – shows the breakdown of Twitter usage.

Twitter infographic

5 countries account for 50% of users and 13 countries account for 74% of users. The graphic is interesting given that China and India, the number 1 and number 3 users of the internet, aren’t represented. Tweeter isn’t allowed in China and India just doesn’t seem interested. Given there are about 200 countries on the planet, then less than 2.5% of countries account for 50% of usage, while 7% account for the majority of Twitter usage.

Countries in the developed world are by far the biggest users of the internet – 77% according to this list. So the only anomaly in this infographic is Saudi Arabia. It is the 34th biggest internet user, all the others are in the top 25 users.

Twitter is dominated by US “celebrities”

tweet by Bill Maher

If you review the Top 100 global Twitter accounts by number of followers, it reveals even more about the users, or more importantly the messages. I may have allocated the odd account to the wrong celebrity segment, but here’s how they stack up:

  • US celebrities: musical, television, movie and vacuous – 58%
  • Non-US celebrities similar to US ones – 15%
  • Websites such as YouTube, 2 Twitter sites, MTV – 10%
  • Football clubs, footballers, basketball players and NBA – 8%
  • News sites – 4%
  • Barack Obama, Bill Gates and Dalai Lama – 3%

There isn’t a single consumer brand in the Top 100!

The biggest users in my country, Australia, are quite insignificant in the number of followers relative to the global Top 100. We only have 2 accounts over 1 million followers and one is of a failed Prime Minister whose account will significantly decline now he’s no longer in office. I think the other is an actor. I have no idea who she is and she probably doesn’t know me either:)

Australia has a larger percentage of sports people in its Top 100, which reflects our society’s high involvement in sport. Every live sports coverage now invites 140 characters of input from viewers. There are even plans to have Tweet screens spread around stadiums so fans can share their Tweets with each other as the game is played. Most live TV shows (eg the News) and many print journalists offer hashtags for readers and viewers to “join the conversation”. Am not sure how many viewers will be “conversing” with a journalist as said journo is reporting a cat stuck up a tree, but that’s just me.

The really interesting thing in the global and local rankings is the almost complete lack of consumer brands in the Top 100. The Aussie list has airlines and a telco. They use Twitter as a customer service tool, due to the problems with delays, flight cancellations and technical issues. This is a very good way to use Twitter if you have a very large customer base and you need to reach them quickly.

But generally speaking, the leading Twitter accounts are not brands or corporations, rather they are individuals or media properties. So why should a company bother with Twitter you ask, particularly given its churn rate?

Twitter churn rate is one of the highest of any service in history

Depending upon the research you read, the churn rate of Twitter users varies from 30% to 80+% within the first 30 days of usage. In 2010, RJMetrics claimed “Twitter’s rate of churn isn’t 60% as Nielsen found, it’s 80%+, with only 17% of Twitter accounts sending a single tweet over the past month“.

Where is the value for companies – apart from using it as a customer service tool to monitor complaints? It costs money to have Twits posting and monitoring tweets, money that could often be better spent elsewhere.

And here’s a fact. If your company never used Twitter, nothing would happen. Your business would not go broke, your share price would not decline and you wouldn’t lose profit. Customers wouldn’t be complaining “Brand X doesn’t tweet, so I’m not going to buy it“.

So relax. Twitter is a nice-to-have not a have-to-have media channel. It’s head-hour intensive and depending on what/how you are tracking, can also involve significant software costs. So it’s not cheap. But it’s here to stay – as it does work for certain niche categories.

As a business owner or marketer you have to decide “is Twitter essential to make and keep customers, or can I make and keep customers without Twitter?”

The answer is simple really. Run a test. Measure the cost of Twitter versus the benefits. This small data, about a BIG DATA product, will paint the picture and make it very easy for you to make the decision.

Hmmm – I wonder if this will be retweeted?

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