Just 16% of Brand Tweets Engage Others, Compared to 43% of Consumers’

Marketers may not be doing enough to truly engage followers in conversations, according to a white paper on marketer and consumer Twitter usage from 360i.

As reported in the eMarketer Daily newsletter, marketers are using a significantly greater share of their tweets to push out news and information rather than converse with other users. Just 16% of brands’ tweets use the “@” symbol, a sign of back-and-forth engagement on the service.

By contrast, the wider Twitter world is conversation-obsessed. Consumers—who make up the vast majority of Twitter users and contribute about 90% of all tweets posted to the service—spend almost half of their tweets on conversational messages beginning with “@.”

Like much other research, this is further proof that Twitter is far more than a place to tell your friends what you ate for lunch (Chicken Sandwich). But it should also get marketers concerned that they may not be participating in microblogging that way that consumers expect them to.

Consumers do want information from brands, and the highly informational content in marketers’ tweets is likely helpful to many followers. But brands must also be ready to actively engage and chat with their followers and potential followers if they want to exploit Twitter’s full capabilities.