There is good news for brands who are using Twitter to further their cause. A recent study has shown that people who follow brands on Twitter are more likely to buy and/or recommend those brands’ products. These findings come from a study carried out by Constant Contact and research firm Chadwick Martin Bailey that analysed the behaviour of 1,491 consumers over the age of 18 throughout the US.
The take away figures were that 60% of brand followers were more likely to recommend a brand to a friend, and 50% of brand followers are more likely to actually buy from that brand. These results were similar to those from a previous study into how consumers interact with brands on Facebook, with 56% saying that they’d be more likely to recommend a brand to a friend after liking their Facebook page, and 51% more likely to buy.
In terms of customer loyalty, there was good news there as well, with 75% of respondents claiming that they had never unfollowed a brand on Twitter.
Either way, it is clearly apparent that having a brand presence on Twitter is a good thing. The means to quickly and broadly communicate with your customer base is a very good arrow to have in your quiver. However it’s one thing being able to talk to your followers en mass, but what are they saying about you?
If your brand is in the enviable position of having thousands of Twitter followers or Facebook fans, there will be a lot of noise to make sense of. The search functions of these two social networks don’t really lend themselves to meaningful sentiment analysis in terms of what people are saying directly to or about you. Granted, you can see how many ‘likes’ or mentions you may get, but that doesn’t really provide any insight as to what people’s opinions are, whether good or bad.
Thankfully there are applications out there that let you backup and analyse twitter and Facebook pages, providing brands and marketers with useful data that can make social media a means of talking with your consumers, not just talking to them.