I’ve written before about small business marketing success stories via Twitter, and I completely understand the potential value of Twitter, but there’s a part of me that wonders why brands devote any true resource to it (other than maybe 20-25 minutes per day). Think about it: it’s a ton of noise a lot of times, the best people to be on it are comedians and journalists, and some argue the life span of a tweet is about 18 seconds before pretty much no one else can ever access it. Plus, there’s like half-a-billion tweets sent every day. At a certain point, trying to stand out there is a challenge.
Now here’s another challenge.
By some measures, 10 percent of the entirety of Twitter is spam. (Uh. OK.) And out of that, some brands are more susceptible than others. Check this:
So a place like Elizabeth Arden uses a “branded campaign” and 9.5 out of 10 mentions of a hashtag are basically leading you into porn? That’s terrible. I’m not saying Elizabeth Arden is necessarily even a brand that should be active on Twitter, because (from what limited amounts I know about Elizabeth Arden) it doesn’t seem like a place where their customers reliably lie, but still … sheesh. 95 percent? And 95 percent for Rite Aid? 81 percent for Visa and 76 percent for Mastercard?
We spend a lot of time breathlessly analyzing the influence of Twitter and other social platforms relative to Twitter, but maybe we should spend a little more time thinking about this spam stat. That’s brutal.
