Is Twitter a thing of the past?

With 217 million active users, 500 million daily tweets and 82% of B2B content marketers using the site, Twitter seems to be a social media platform that’s booming and should be included in every businesses’ marketing plan. But with the introduction of new forms of social posting, especially short videos and carousel photo posts, things look set to change. Twitter turned 16 this year and for a lot of people, the social channel is a go-to source for the latest on everything worth talking about. For marketers and influencers it presents an amazing opportunity to capture attention, but is it really still worth the time or are the likes of Instagram and TikTok now knocking Twitter off its perch?

Video content on the rise

There’s no doubt video marketing has become a breakthrough trend over recent years, with 87% of video marketers reporting a positive return on investment, an increase from just 33% in 2015. Video content, especially short form, allows your business to communicate to consumers in an exciting way that shows a brand’s personality, with 69% of consumers saying they would prefer to learn about a product or service through video, compared with 18% who would prefer text based posts (source: Brandwatch).

A study by Brandwatch found that women are far more likely to interact with brands on social media platforms. That means B2B marketers will have some tough decisions to make about how they put together content and target their audience. The likes of Instagram reels and TikTok have now become the social platforms of choice, being purely video based, seeing year on year increases in popularity.

Customers want to talk

Undoubtedly, Twitter offers a great opportunity for businesses in the area of customer service. When customers have an issue, they want to be able to voice their concerns to the business as easily as possible, with the aim of getting it resolved as quickly as possible. Twitter is an ideal platform for businesses to talk to their customers whether it be good or bad feedback, and as the messages are shared publicly, businesses have more motivation to respond as soon as possible. But in order for Twitter to be beneficial to a business on a customer service front, they need to have dedicated teams keeping an eagle eye on their account and answer all tweets in a satisfactory time. Six out of ten Twitter users expect a business to respond to a customer service query within an hour.

Twitter, Instagram or Tiktok?

Twitter is the preferred social network for news consumption because of its fast nature. This can be great if you want to share news stories from your account, but not as exciting if you want to make your account more about your brand.

Instagram has over 1 billion active users every month, of which 500 million use the platform every day (source: Techcrunch).  83% of users surveyed reported that Instagram has helped them discover new products or services. As the platform is owned by Facebook, it allows for cross-platform promotion and the security of being backed by a large, fast-growing company. Instagram users spend an average of 53 minutes per day on the platform.  Brands can generate over four times more interactions from users than Facebook and Instagram helps 80% of users decide whether to buy a product or service (source: socialbakers).

TikTok has hit the ground running, with 2 billion downloads worldwide by April 2020 (source: oberlo). This explosive growth makes its parent company, ByteDance, the most valuable private company in the world. The app is taking the social media world by storm, without a doubt, but it is also important to remember that the average TikTok user is very young (though that’s changing) and the platform is 100% video content. And, paid ads on TikTok can be expensive in comparison to other platforms. But...

·      the app has 800 million active users worldwide

·      the number of US adult TikTok users grew 5.5 times in less than 18 months

·      posts on TikTok average a 52.1% engagement rate (source: influencermarketinghub), and accounts with fewer than 1000 followers have an average engagement rate of 144.9% with the average engagement rate on Instagram hovering at around 3% (source: socialmediacollege).

Even if you don’t think TikTok is a good fit for your brand, you still need to be learning from it and you need to consider its application as part of your social media strategy. Whether or not you’re planning on launching an active presence on the platform any time soon you need to be aware that trends are being shaped by the platform as it influences social culture.

 So, as a B2B marketer, should you be paying attention to TikTok? The short answer is, yes. In March 2006, the first-ever tweet was posted on the internet, changing the way we interact forever.  But social media is evolving and as we enter the beginning of a new era of digital use, Twitter’s 280 character posts may well be fading into the background.