For years, Twitter has been one of the top social media sites for viral online marketing content. In fact, Twitter is still the 4th most popular social media site in the whole of the United States.
However, there is a line of thought today that Twitter is a dying cause for content marketers and that content marketers should move on to bigger and better things.
The major basis of this line of though is that Twitter growth has stagnated in recent years. Between 2015 and 2016, the numbers of monthly active Twitter users has remained relatively stable at between 304 and 310 million.
And even before that growth since 2013 has been slow. If new users are not joining Twitter, then many people think the next event to occur is that Twitter users will give up and move on to other, newer social media options that are more trendy and exciting.
The question is, will this happen? And should content marketers move on to a bigger and better cause?
The reality is more complicated than a simple predicted trend. While Twitter user growth may have plateaued, this does not mean that it is the beginning of the end by any means. In fact, Twitter and the NFL recently announced a streaming partnership for Thursday night football.
This exclusive partnership is a sign that Twitter is nowhere near finished and content marketers should not be so quick to dismiss the power that Twitter still has to disseminate content and build an audience.
Of course, there are some causes for concern that Twitter may be a problematic content marketing choice because it may put too much focus on engagement with irrelevant audiences.
Twitter has the ability to take a single tweet and make it go viral, meaning that is spreads all across the internet and reaches a huge audience.
The issue is whether or not this translates to an increase in sales. And this is where content marketers may have a problem.
The correlation between Twitter engagement and actual sales is difficult to track. You may have thousands of re-tweets on Twitter but only a slight uptick in sales (or even none at all).
Twitter can be a difficult content marketing option to justify spending time on for this fact alone. Other sites may offer better tracking metrics and a more tangible correlation between sales and engagement.
Now that you better understand the issues pertaining to content marketing and the use of Twitter, you can decide for yourself and your business whether or not Twitter is where you want to focus your marketing efforts.
Do you use Twitter to promote your work or your business? Let me know in the comments section below.
