Does Twitter make sense for marketing?

While this infographic is 8 months old it provides some good information that you should understand.

Before digging into these statistics too deeply, also consider:

• As of April, 2010, Twitter had about 110 million registered users.
• Based upon research by Nielsen in April of 2010 only 11.4 million of those registered Twitter users used Twitter daily.
• As of June 18th, Twitter sees 750 tweets/second with 65 million tweets taking place on an average day.
• In January of 2010 the average Twitter user had just 27 followers according to research done by RJMetrics.

Okay, what does this mean? it means that the average Twitter user can reach 729 users for each Tweet that is retweeted (assuming the 27 followers per user). Now, if 20% of those accounts are truly dead accounts, that brings the reach down to 583 users that might reached with a given tweet if it is retweeted once. The infographic to our right shows us, however, that only 8% of Tweets are retweetable.

This means the average user must tweet 12.5 times to see one retweet of content.

The average user only reaches those 27 users in the vast majority of tweets. In fact, out of every 13 tweets their message only reaches an audience of 907 potential viewers. Again, however, 20% of these are dead/inactive accounts, bringing our number to 726 viewers (583 unique users).

Of course, this assumes that the all potential viewers are logged in when your tweet is sent and that they are not busy reading other people’s tweets. It is safe to say that you would be lucky to see 10% of these users actually logged in at any moment, further reducing our audience down to 73 viewers with 58 uniques in that set.

For the average user it takes 13 tweets to reach 58 unique viewers.

It does not pay to use Twitter for marketing if you are an average user.

Does Twitter make sense for marketing? The answer that it depends. Understanding the numbers should help you decide the right answer for your organization.

John