Will Elon acquire Twitter? Is the McChicken video still on Twitter? Is twitter politically biased? Possibly those would make good topics for conversation at a dinner party. But corporations aren't really concerned about these challenges. Twitter actually isn't a fantastic location for the majority of small companies.
The causes are cited in a recent Pew Research paper.
To begin with, just 23% of adults in the United States utilize social media. YouTube (81%) and Facebook (69%) are used by a lot more people than Instagram (40 percent). Furthermore, just a small portion of Twitter users really write the vast bulk of tweets. According to Pew, among American adults who use Twitter, the top 25% of users by tweet volume are responsible for creating 97% of all tweets. Just 3% of users in the bottom 75% generate anything.
My advice: Despite having very little marketing budget, I've always had trouble focusing my efforts. The smartest marketers I know advise me to go where my consumers are and to follow the money. It appears that clients are most likely not using Twitter for most American businesses, including mine. Furthermore, it is likely that there aren't many of them.
Twitter is vary political and tends to lean more to the left. I'm not saying that's a good or bad thing. It's just that if your business is going to be active on Twitter, you need to be careful what you say. I've learned this the hard way. A few times I've tweeted something political and was on the receiving end of the opposing Twitter mob. I've found that people on the platform are less likely to be kind towards conservative-leaning businesses (I'm thinking firearms) and ideas. If you're political and you want to air your views (and given my experience, I don't recommend doing this publicly if you're a business owner), you may wind up alienating potential customers and employees. Be careful, it's a crazy place.
Finally, Twitter can be quite unwelcoming. Ask everyone who has used the platform and has an opinion to express it. There will undoubtedly be many who disagree and launch their assaults, including those individuals who are really hostile. According to Pew, around one in five adult Twitter users in the U.S. has been the victim of harassment or abuse on the site. A third report seeing a lot of false or deceptive stuff there. The majority of adult Twitter users have fortunately not encountered harassment or abuse on the platform. But 17% of respondents claim that this has personally occurred to them.
I use Twitter all the time. That's because besides running a small business, I also do a lot of writing about small businesses for various media sites like this one. For the media, Twitter is a place to go to (but not rely on) for news and opinions. It's also a good place for small businesses that specialize in PR and marketing. Or, for just getting information and points of view on an event. My favorite use of Twitter? Following the #phillies hashtags so I can commiserate with fellow fans in real-time as my team loses, which it frequently does.
When selecting a social media site, keep in mind who your target audience is. Because most of my clients are in the business-to-business sector, I choose LinkedIn for my company. It's also a professional setting for interaction with them.
LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft, whose CEO Satya Nadella regularly refers to it as a place to go for "economic opportunity," and he couldn't be more accurate. However, Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok could be better choices if you're a B2C firm looking to establish a community. Each of these platforms has a lot to teach us, of course. But one thing I've discovered about Twitter is that most small businesses shouldn't use it.
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