The Advantages and Disadvantages of Twitter as a Marketing Tool

·Twitter has an active monthly user base of around 330 million, making it a highly appealing platform for companies to market their products and reach a wider audience. Many of the world's largest companies and organizations today use Twitter. While not as broad an audience as Facebook, it is still easily accessible.

·Twitter has a character count of 280 per post, this encourages companies to be to the point and concise with the information they are posting and gives users a good idea of what their product is about without having to read a long post. Users can retweet this information to their followers if they find it interesting, creating a chain effect and helping a company's product reach a wider audience.

·Twitter is a very easy to use service for business owners and does not require much knowledge of technology to use, business owners who wish to advertise their product simply need to set up an account, start following an audience to gain attentions, and then tweet and retweet.

· Twitter posts are indexed by search engines which makes it easier for a post to be discovered, companies can include a popular hashtag in their tweets, and should someone search for that in a search engine, the company's tweet is more likely to appear for them.

·Twitter as a platform is primarily a place where people discuss and share their opinions, should a company wish to gauge public interest and gather honest feedback then Twitter would be the place to do that.

·However, Twitter also has its disadvantages, for example, the 280-character limit, while allowing companies to be concise and to the point, it also limits companies from relaying all of the information they need to at any given point, therefore Twitter is not a good place to announce now products or services, but rather keep customers up to date on current services.

·Twitter is very time sensitive, a user's timeline is laid out in chronological order according to each post, therefore a company must learn what time is best to post their content in order maximize traffic to their post, because if a company were to post when the majority of their audience won’t be logged on, then their post will be buried beneath a number of other posts that came after it.

·Like Facebook, Twitter will require a company to have a team in place to manage their page and what content is posted, this particularly important for Twitter as this team needs to trained and skilled in how to relay information effectively and efficiently, as well, having someone with a sense of humor and empathy who can relate to a customer on a human level can lead to positive branding.

·It is not ideal for rich media content. Despite being able to post images on Twitter, it is mostly text-based, and it doesn’t allow you to post more than one picture at a time, let alone videos, companies can only add links to YouTube. Text based media is much harder to convey the message you want to convey over rich media.