A study done by Nielsen in June of 2010 a consumers spend a monthly average of 4 hrs 39 minutes 33 seconds on Facebook 31 minutes 17 seconds on Twitter Twitter is losing its effectiveness. It's always been a tough medium to use and while more people seem to get tired of it quickly. There are 5 things wrong with Twitter when it comes to using it as a marketing tool and I'm going to share them with you.
It's time-consuming. The majority people on Twitter with large amounts of following spend hours not minutes engaging in those relationships. While that sounds easy for the average person working in a daily job that is not social media focused it's a tough act to follow.
The attention span of those signing up for Twitter continues to dwindle and retention of users seems to be suffering. The average consumer doesn't understand how to use it as a tool and therefore becomes frustrated. Without tutorials and someone to guide it's a land that's easy to get lost in.
The majority of those on Twitter are marketers, so unless you want to market to marketers you may be better off spending your time elsewhere. This is why you'll see a lot of success with B2B business on Twitter.
It's a very noisy place to be with typically 1 out of 10 Tweets containing no marketing message or links. That's a lot of messages to cipher through to find anything of value.
The one thing that I think Twitter can help companies with is being used to provide customer service and support to customers that are looking for you on Twitter. This can be easily done using alerts and Twitter search tools. Keep in mind that Twitter can work for some companies