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John Danenbarger
A new report (shown above) by email marketing firm Constant Contact and researchers Chadwick Martin Bailey has thrown up a bunch of interesting statistics about Twitter and the relationship between brands and customers on the site. Many of those figures, taken from a survey of 1,491 US-based consumers aged over 18, are reason to put a smile on any marketer’s face.
In particular:
- 60% of people are more likely to recommend a brand to a friend after following it.
- 50% of people are more likely to buy from a brand after following it.
- 75% of people who follow brands have never un-followed one.
For businesses that already have long lists of Twitter followers, that’s great news. It means that those lists are rich with both evangelists and customers, and they’re stable — a valuable asset indeed.
But here’s what really stands out from the survey. When it came to the top five reasons that people chose to follow a brand on a site, the breakdown was:
- 64% — “I am a customer of the company”
- 61% — “To be the first to know information about the brand”
- 48% — “To receive discounts and promotions”
- 36% — “To gain access to exclusive content”
- 28% — “To receive content/information to re-tweet and share with others”
Just under half of brand followers then were looking for discounts while the top two reasons had nothing to do with anything as solid as saving money on their next purchase. Instead, the biggest factors driving people to follow a brand on Twitter — with all that says about the prospect’s willingness to provide recommendations, purchase and stay loyal — are a more amorphous sense of belonging.
People follow brands on Twitter because they associate themselves with the company and want to feel that they have a special relationship with it. It’s the same reason that Apple fanboys read sites like MacRumors and CultofMac, even though much of the information the sites contain is wrong and the accurate details filter into the mainstream press eventually anyway. They read because they’re already fanboys and keeping tabs on Apple’s rumors is what fanboys do.
Companies that don’t have Apple’s cult appeal will need to work a little harder. If people are following brand streams because they already feel a sense of loyalty, the hard work is being done before they reach the social media site. It’s being done through image, through the company’s story, through all of the branding techniques that marketers have used for years to build loyalty among customers.
It’s a valuable lesson to remember: social media sites like Twitter are invaluable tools for measuring brand loyalty, harnessing brand loyalty, generating referrals, sparking purchases and keeping customers loyal. But they’re not complete replacements for the traditional marketing methods that create that loyalty in the first place.
If we go back to the statistics above about the top five reasons that people chose to follow a brand on a site, I would suggest that the top two statistics are because of the following three. In other words, use Twitter to offer the discounts/special offers and then you will gain more of those who like to be fans.
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