22 Pros and Cons of Twitter for Business

Twitter is a game-changer when it comes to promoting your business. With nearly 400 million potential people that can be reached with a single tweet, you can mass market a product or use smart demographics to reach niche customers with ease. Here are the key points to consider when looking at the pros and cons of Twitter for business.

What Are the Pros of Twitter for Business?

1. You know your followers are going to get your message.
Unlike other social networking sites, you have 100% certainty that your followers are going to see the tweets you send out. There’s no algorithm which requires engagement for posts to be seen. This allows you to spend more time creating content for your followers and less time trying to figure out how many people are actually getting to see your content on any given day.

2. It doesn’t take long to create a good tweet.
Because the length of a tweet on Twitter is limited, it doesn’t take much effort to provide a specific message to your followers. You might invest a lot of time and effort into the content of your site, but it really only takes a couple of minutes to craft a tweet at most. In doing so, you’ll be able to connect your followers to your site or distribute brand images with ease and keep your business at the top of the minds of your followers.

3. You can reach out to almost any corner of the planet.
There are very few places where Twitter is unable to reach. Even in nations that block this social site, many users work diligently to get around those blocks. This can help a business break into a foreign market much more quickly than in the traditional sense because you can have brand recognition. Think about it: a tweet which takes two minutes to write could potentially reach millions of people in just seconds. That is a powerful marketing mechanism which shouldn’t be ignored.

4. It is easy to track the data collected through Twitter.
Whether you want to see the reactions you get to specific hashtags or you’re just looking to see the reach of a tweet through the number of favorites and retweets it received, there are multiple ways to track the data which gets collected. You can even look at data by the hour if you wish. This information can also be exported into helpful graphs so you can visualize the data for a better understanding of it.

5. You don’t have to stay online to reach people.
One of the fascinating evolutionary elements of Twitter is called the “TweetUp.” This is a gathering of like-minded Twitter users who are within a geographical region that occurs off-line. Your business can schedule a TweetUp virtually anywhere, invite followers in that area to come meet you, and this allows you to make what you’re offering even more real than it already is.

6. You don’t need to use link shortening tools.
Although bit.ly and other link shortening tools are quite helpful, they are not always necessary on Twitter. The social network will automatically shorten any links you include with a tweet as much as they possibly can. You’ll always see how many characters you have left for your tweet as well, so you can structure the content being shared very effectively in real time.

7. You can automate Twitter for Business.
Don’t have time to create 5-6 tweets per day for your followers? Thanks to the helpful tools on this platform, you can completely automate the sharing process. Spend an hour crafting tweets for the week, schedule out when you want your tweets to go out, and you’re done. All you’ve got to do is periodically check your account for @ replies or questions to what you’ve shared. This means you could even go on vacation for an extended period of time, but still not lose the marketing momentum that you’ve established.

8. It is easy to extend the reach of your company.
If you send out a tweet which one of your followers really likes, then there is a good chance they will retweet it. Once that happens, your account will then reach all of their followers. Now one of their followers might really like it as well. They decide to follow your account and then retweet your content again. This process makes it very, very easy to expand the reach of your brand because each retweet acts as its own ambassador.

9. It becomes easy to share your voice with other brands.
Maybe you’ve only got 500 followers on your Twitter for Business account right now. Your competition might have 5 million. You might not be able to compete in the follower count, but there is a good chance that at least a few of your followers have your competition on their feeds in addition to your brand. Talking with other companies, sharing your voice, and having personal opinions broadcast over a wide spectrum is incredibly easy thanks to the format of Twitter. Sometimes your competition can also become one of your biggest allies.

10. Twitter for Business does a great job of reaching the younger generations.
For kids that were born before a world filled with landline phones, 56k modems, and AOL chat rooms being the best thing you could do online, Twitter is perfectly suited to their needs. Many of today’s kids are trying to do 5 things at once and they do a pretty good job of it. The environment on Twitter is constantly changing and your brand gets to become part of that experience. It’s an easy way to establish the trust needed to begin a relationship.

11. It can be free.
You could pay for promoted tweets. You could pay someone to run your Twitter account. Or you could sign up for free and manage everything yourself. Twitter for Business is a budget-friendly way to give your message some added influence.

What Are the Cons of Twitter For Business?

1. Many people have hundreds, if not thousands, of accounts that they follow.
You know for certain that your tweets are going to show up on a person’s feed. What you don’t know is how likely someone is going to be to actually read that tweet. Many Twitter users follow several hundred accounts. Some follow thousands of accounts. If you’re just 1 tweet in 1,000, those aren’t very good odds to be found, even if you are seen.

2. You never know how active a follower account is going to be.
There are several tools that you can use to determine when someone sent a tweet last, but there’s not much out there to determine which accounts are reading tweets, but not sending any on their own. If you have 10,000 followers, you might discover that only 10% are actually looking for your tweets just 10% more are acting on the information that you’re sending. In this scenario, you’d have 100 active followers for your brand. Bottom line: don’t count your dollars based on the total number of followers you have.

3. Twitter for Business is ridiculously addictive.
It is very common for Twitter marketers, business users, and even personal account holders to check their Twitter account several times per day. It doesn’t take long for someone to start obsessively checking for replies, favorites, and retweets on each shared content. Because there is so much immediate gratification on this platform, one must schedule specific times to be on Twitter and stick to them. Consider setting up notifications of replies so you can respond appropriately.

4. It is easy to become distracted on Twitter.
There are numerous debates happening on Twitter every day. Current events, politics, movies, and television shows are always being discussed in some way. If you’re focusing on the current trends that are happening on the platform instead of your business identity, it can become very easy to find yourself distracted by the conversations going on. If that happens for long enough, it is even possible to lose your brand identity.

5. Beware of the spam.
Twitter users are a smart bunch. They can quickly recognize the businesses which just want to sell them something. Your reputation on Twitter is immediately established, so if you cause a bad taste in the mouth of your early followers, it can be difficult to recover from that. Users will shun you and you won’t even realize it because you’re so focused on trying to sell your brand to them. Go in with the attitude that you’re going to engage people in genuine conversation. Tell an authentic story. When people can relate to you, then they’ll be able to accept the occasional sales pitch from you.

6. The time involved may not be worth the actual cost for some businesses.
It takes a lot of time to engage with the community you develop. Many of the larger brands have full-time workers manning their Twitter account to make sure people receive a response in a reasonable amount of time. If you’re trying to do this all on your own, the experience can become overwhelming very quickly. You might even find that you’re sacrificing other aspects of your business to keep up with Twitter. Consider your ROI carefully and monitor it frequently to make sure Twitter for Business is right for you.

7. More exposure for your brand will mean more negative interactions.
You can please some of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time. You’ll find this rule is very much in force on Twitter. Even if you think you’ve sent the most non-offensive tweet possible, there’s a good chance that someone will be dissatisfied with the content you’ve sent out. Their negative response can also be instantly sent to millions of people around the world. Unless you turn the conversation around, that negative impression [even if it is a false negative impression] can be very damaging.

8. Accidents with your Twitter account can and will happen.
We’ve heard some of the stories about tweets that brands should have never sent out. This is going to happen at some point. You might have something on your clipboard that you paste into a tweet in a hurry and not really notice that the content you wanted to post didn’t copy. A picture meant for your Facebook feed might go to your Twitter for Business account instead. Once the tweet is retweeted, you can’t fully delete it. Followers will have seen it and made judgments because of it.

9. It can be difficult to distinguish between a troll and a concerned follower.
Insults happen on Twitter frequently. It can be easy to take them personally, but do your best to ignore them if you can. Sometimes even your best customers can become dissatisfied by an experience and will start creating toxic content about your business. If you don’t remain professional in how you handle this situation, the entire world is going to see. Push the negativity away, focus on the positive elements of what you’re doing, and you’ll be able to get past the difficult moments.

10. Twitter for Business can sometimes suffer from credibility issues.
You’ll find plenty of benefits that come from Twitter for Business. You’ll also find that a lot of the information being shared on the platform from others doesn’t come from sourced data. It is common to find a fake death circulating through the account ranks. Fake news is everywhere, but it is posted as if it were real. Because of this, you may find some followers are unwilling to engage because they don’t see your account as being “real.” You’ve got to prove yourself sometimes before you can even think about building a community.

11. Nothing is going to happen immediately.
The brands making the best use of Twitter right now already have mass market brand recognition. The expectations are often set too high when using this platform. The goal for a new business should be to build a niche community with personal expertise and then use that as a foundation to keep building. This takes a lot of work to do, it can take 12+ months to gain any traction, and that’s a time investment which not everyone is willing to make.

In Conclusion

Twitter for Business has some definite benefits that make it an intriguing platform for today’s brands. It also has some specific disadvantages which must be addressed if the full potential of what Twitter can do will ever be achieved. Like any other tool on the internet, eventually your tweets will only be as good as the efforts that happen behind the scenes.

If your account looks fake or your content seems insincere [or worse, plagiarized], then your brand reputation could be quickly destroyed. On the other hand, when you tell your own story in an authentic way and avoid trying to make the hard sell with your early tweets, Twitter can become an amazing experience.

Is Twitter for Business right for you? It could be if you’re looking to create an online community of followers who are interested in engaging with your business on a personal level. It’s fast, it’s effective, and it will work. Give it a try today while considering these pros and cons and you might just reach your next business goals.