360i Study on Twitter: Did We Miss Something?

During a webinar hosted by the Advertising Research Foundation yesterday, we asked the speaker Dan Neely, CEO of social media analytics firm Networked Insights, what he thought about 360i’s just-released study on Twitter.

The main conclusion of the 360i study: most brands remain irrelevant on Twitter.

As reported on Adage.com, “of the 90% of Twitter messages sent by real people—the other 10% come from businesses—only 12% ever mention a brand, and most of those mentions are of Twitter itself.”

Now Dan Neely told us something interesting when we asked him what he made of these stats. He said that on the entire World Wide Web, only about 10% of the conversation is about brands.

Keep in mind his business is to monitor digital and social conversations and analyze the information for trends and insights. In other words, it’s a safe assumption that the guy knows his digital stuff.

To his way of thinking then, it wasn’t surprising that only 12% of conversations on Twitter mention a brand. In fact, in the analysis his firm runs, only 3% of Twitter conversations have value for clients.

Our main question, though, comes from the much-touted findings that only 1% of consumer tweets that mention a brand are part of a conversation with that brand and only 12% of all marketer tweets demonstrate active dialogue with consumers.

360i found that 43% of all tweets start with an @, which means they are conversational in nature.

True, according to the 360i study, it appears that of all the ways people can use Twitter for personal reasons, carrying on conversations represents a big part of what they use it for. But we've got to wonder how this carries over to when they’re looking to make purchase decisions. Do they want brands to communicate with them directly, conversationally, on Twitter?

Yesterday, Neely maintained that Twitter is primarily a broadcast medium. Companies use it to share information and content. The opening introduction to the 360i report also states that “a large volume of people are reading content on Twitter, even if they aren’t participating in the conversations themselves.”

To us, it looks like there is some value to focusing on one-way conversations to get product and service information out into the blogosphere. There's a big audience of people who potentially will read it. They may not chat about it online, but it’s conceivable it has benefits as far as awareness and shaping perceptions and attitudes off-line.

We’re not sure based on the 360i study you can safely conclude brands are “irrelevant on Twitter.” Maybe Twitter users aren’t talking about brands in personal conversations, but we didn’t see anything in the study that substantiates the claim that they are barely “listening” to what brands have to say.

Or did we miss something?