Twitter has become one of the darlings of the social media age. For reasons that many people find incomprehensible, many people cannot seem to resist receiving short little messages from complete strangers or friends, politicians, sports heroes or even movie stars. Although this trend actually started in the United States, it caught on all over the world and today Twitter has over half a billion users worldwide. Leveraging that popularity, they recently started selling shares to the public and the stock price rose quickly. Given the fact that the basic service itself is free, Twitter is counting, like many other social media platforms, on advertising to make money. If that strategy actually works or not remains to be seen.
Expanding Its Reach
Call me jaded, but it doesn’t appear to be a coincidence that just a week after going public, Twitter has decided to allow small businesses in the UK, Canada and Ireland to advertise on their platform. Up to this point, this service was only available in the United States. It seems obvious that Twitter wants to start making some serious money as quickly as possible, lest their stock price takes a punch in the nose. Up to this point, anyone in the UK that wanted to advertise on Twitter had to establish a special working relationship with the company, which limited the audience to fairly large companies. With this move, they are opening up a whole new and quite large market. From a pure marketing sense, on Twitter’s part, it makes a lot of sense. The question is, are small and medium enterprises (SMEs) going to care?
Who is the audience?
The truth is, Twitter is mostly used by the younger generations. Most people over 30 either don’t know much about the platform, or just don’t care. There are exceptions to this rule, of course, but even in the United States, recent studies have shown that many teenagers have started using Twitter far more than Facebook. Oh, the vagaries of youth! Many SMEs in the UK have been doing quite well with their traditional forms of advertising. It really remains to be seen if they want to take the time, effort and expense to learn how to effectively advertise on this somewhat unknown platform. For Twitter, it is arguably quite a gamble. Perhaps it will work and perhaps it won’t.
Using Tried-And-True Methods
Most companies in the UK have had excellent results over the years using printed advertising to attract customers and convey their offers and value propositions. Chances are this isn’t going to change any time soon. But it is important to be able to work with a professional printing company to get the quality of printed materials that you need, at a cost which is reasonable. This is also easily solved. Just visit vitalconceptprint.co.uk/ and discover a printing company that has a reputation for excellence and can provide you with practically any type of printed material you need, custom tailored to your specific requirements. With that problem solved, you can look forward to outstanding sales this season.
