Twitter Marketing: What Every Business Needs to Know
A decision framework for whether a business should bother with Twitter in 2008, given how few customers were on it yet and how thin the tools still were.
The honest first question: is your audience even there?
By late 2008, Twitter was roughly two and a half years old and still small next to Facebook or MySpace. Before spending a single hour on it, a business owner needed to answer one question honestly: do enough of my actual customers use this yet to justify the time? For most local businesses and traditional retailers, the answer in 2008 was no. Twitter’s early audience skewed toward tech workers, media professionals and early-adopter consumers, concentrated in cities and industries connected to the tech and media world. A plumbing company or a regional insurance agency had little reason to prioritize it over getting a Facebook Page or an email list in order.
Where the calculus flipped was for businesses that sold to that early-adopter audience directly, or that had a customer service problem Twitter could solve. Tech companies, media brands and consumer brands with a national footprint and an existing PR presence had more to gain, because the people most likely to complain publicly, or to amplify a good response, were already there.
What it would cost you
Twitter marketing in 2008 required almost no money and a real amount of attention. There was no advertising to buy. The cost was staff time: someone who could write in the brand’s voice in short bursts, monitor mentions throughout the day and respond quickly enough that the public part of a public reply worked in the brand’s favor rather than against it. Comcast’s experiment that year, putting a support employee on Twitter to find and resolve complaints, worked because someone was watching and answering, not because the company had a strategy document.
That points to the real risk of adopting Twitter too early: an abandoned or silent account was arguably worse than no account at all, since anyone who found it would draw conclusions about how much the company cared to engage.
A simple way to decide
A business considering Twitter in 2008 could reasonably ask three questions. First, is a meaningful slice of my customers or my industry’s influencers already using this, based on what I can observe rather than what I assume? Second, do I have someone who can commit real, regular time to it, not as an afterthought bolted onto another job? Third, is there a specific problem this particular tool solves better than what I’m already doing, whether that’s customer service response time, industry visibility or word-of-mouth among an early-adopter niche? If the answer to at least two of those was yes, an experiment was worth running. If not, the more sensible move was to keep watching, since the tools, the ad products and the audience were all still maturing, and there would be more evidence to act on within a year or two.
