Are brands really using twitter?

This post got me thinking
“93 of top 100 brands don’t control their Twitter name”
I know Zappos have done an amazing job with twitter and I have engaged with their CEO Tony Hsieh who has over 30,000 fans including me.
Shel has been interviewing a number of corporate Twitterers for his book Twitterville but I am yet to be convinced that the companies are engaging the Twitter medium.
Take my own account for example, I have 3 companies following me but I mention at least 10-15 products every week, stuff I love, stuff I don’t like, I have never been engaged on Twitter and can’t recall a response to a Twitter shout out.
Two weeks ago I opened my twitter account up, I had my profile locked for quite a while but decided to give it a shot.
I am again inundated with social media types but no brands especially not any of the brands I have spoke about in the past, do the social media types want to promote themselves or the brands the represent?.This has always been my concern regarding social media
The Crunchies awards took place in San Francisco last night and I decided to do a little test and to check the companies that made the finals on their use of twitter.
Each hyperlink is the companies twitter account

Best Application Or Service

Get Satisfaction, heavy users, only following 10% of their followers though
Google Reader (winner) never posted on twitter
Minted, dont own their own twitter
Meebo , dont own their own twitter
MySpace Music (runner-up) dont own their own twitter
Yelp ,suspended account

Best Technology Innovation/Achievement

Facebook Connect (runner-up) following 7, 4000 followers, quite small numbers
Google Friend Connect
Google Chrome
Windows Live Mesh (winner) dont own their own twitter
Swype No activity
Yahoo BOSS following 35, 1500 followers, 2 tweets a week.

Best Design

Animoto (runner-up) great users of twitter
Cooliris (winner) don’t own their own twitter
Friendfeed No activity, 400 followers
Infectious No engagement or activity.
Lala owned by someone from Indonesia
Sliderocket , very good use of Twitter

Best Bootstrapped Startup

BackType, excellent users of Twitter
GitHub (winner) excellent users of twitter
Socialcast excellent users of twitter
StatSheet excellent users of twitter
12seconds.tv (runner-up) probably the best users of twitter
Notice a theme here, all the Bootstrapped start-ups are heavy twitter users :-)

Most Likely To Make The World A Better Place

Akoha excellent users
Causes , no engagement or activity
CO2Stats , No twitter account
GoodGuide (winner) just started, 32 followers
Kiva (runner-up) dont own their own twitter page
Better Place

Best Enterprise Startup

Amazon Web Services (winner) excellent user, follow, DM them a book title and they will DM you back if in stock and cost, no engaging though
Force.com dont own their own twitter page
Google App Engine (runner-up)
Yammer , account doesnt exist??? TC50 winners!!!!
Zoho, excellent and engaging

Best International Startup

eBuddy (winner) just joined, 1 post
Fotonauts engaging, excellent
OpenX excellent, engaging
Vente-privee account doesn’t exist
Wuala (runner-up) engaging

Best Clean Tech Startup

Better Place (runner-up) engaging
Boston Power not their account
ElectraDrive account doesn’t exist
Laurus Energy account doesn’t exist
Project Frog (winner) account exists, no activity

Best New Gadget/Device

Android G1 (runner-up) account doesn’t exist, surprised at this
Ausus EEE 1000 Series account doesn’t exist
Flip MinoHD account doesn’t exist
iPhone 3G (winner) not their own account
SlingCatcher account doesn’t exist
100% fail on manufacturers, especially surprised at Flip

Best Time Sink Site/Application

Mob Wars nothing on this
iBowl no twitter account
Tap Tap Range (winner) no activity
Zivity excellent engagers
Texas Hold Em (runner-up)

Best Mobile Startup

ChaCha (runner-up) outstanding engagement on twitter
Evernote (winner) outstanding engagement on twitter
Posterous good engagement on twitter
Qik auto blog posting on twitter
Skyfire good twitter engagement
Truphone, not long joined, but excellent participation

Best Mobile Application

Google Mobile Application (runner-up)
imeem mobile (winner) excellent participation
Pandora Radio no twitter account at Pandora or
rolando No twitter account
ShopSavvy engaging, very small community
Ocarina Not their account

Interesting reading, bootstrapped and mobile are clear winners, lots of the big brands have done little or no engaging.

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14 comments...What do you think?

  1. Posted by Paddy 10th January, 2009 at 12:54 pm

    Great post. It’s surprising how many companies are not realising the huge benefits that are available through using Twitter. 2009 will be an interesting one to see which brands take full advantage.

  2. Posted by Steve Nimmons 10th January, 2009 at 1:02 pm

    Excellent insight – thank-you. It not only gave me a breakdown of ‘runners and riders’ per category, but also their level of Twitter participation making it very easy to spot if there were gaps in ‘who is I was following’. There were some surprises in terms of who is lacking in their Twitter efforts. I guess their focus is elsewhere. It was be interesting to get insight into where else that focus might be ‘pointing’.

  3. Posted by Rodney Rumford 10th January, 2009 at 1:05 pm

    Pat,
    This is a great post! The business brands that have dropped the ball on Twitter is astounding. 5 months ago I wrote a similar post and we still have seen ongoing issues with brands being slow to step up to the plate and engage.

    Smaller businesses are more adept and are leveraging twitter at a rapidly increasing velocity.

    The big problem that these companies have is that they do not know how to effectively listen and respond on twitter. I have had many large brands respond to mentions (starbucks, dunkin donuts, ford, hrblock, sprint, kodak, etc.) as well as many smaller brands. They were smart and were listening proactively. Most companies do not have a clue about where to begin and how to engage properly. They all need to read my upcoming book. ;)

    This is a great list and summary of the crunchies and their twitter info. ;)

    Cheers!

    Rodney Rumford

  4. Posted by Niall Harbison 10th January, 2009 at 2:22 pm

    Excellent post. We use twitter to engage with the community on iFoods and will continue to do so even more in the future. I think it is a fantastic tool and I try to respond to every reply or DM. I think it is a great way of humanizing a business and people feel a lot more confident using your product if they can connect with you directly.

  5. Posted by Campbell Scott 10th January, 2009 at 5:46 pm

    Great analysis.

    Couple of thoughts – is it just that twitter is still growing and brands are waiting until it gets a little bit more mass market? Many of those that are using it are doing so pretty well -eg, ryanair, FBD.ie, VodafoneIreland.

    I also have one small problem with connecting with brands on twitter – communication is best when personal, which means talking to people. if we can find a way to use twitter to have good conversations with a name and face, rather than a brand and a logo, then it will be more of a personal experience, with that little bit of emotion.

  6. Posted by Nigel Walsh 10th January, 2009 at 8:21 pm

    Very good post. Another similar experiment here too with brands outside the tech space.

    http://www.socialmedian.com/story/2358991/brands-that-tweet

  7. Posted by Michele 11th January, 2009 at 1:37 am

    Pat
    The amazon twitter account isn’t official – the profile links to: http://overstimulate.com/

    Michele

  8. Posted by Jackie Danicki 12th January, 2009 at 6:23 pm

    Pat, I think you’re measuring the wrong thing, and it’s the thing most of these social media strategists get wrong, too.

    People do not engage with brands. People engage with people who work on products.

    For example, at Qik, we have multiple people doing constant reactive and proactive outreach to our users. @broy, @michaelf, @danielbru, @janefu, @rmallik, @hrag and myself to name just a few – we talk directly to users daily. I could give links to specific tweets and blog posts hailing our fast and effective response via Twitter. It works. (TweetDeck is a huge help in this, btw.) The Qik feed is basically an alternative RSS feed for our blog and events.

    You don’t “engage” with a logo or brand name, you connect and engage with the people who are building and improving products.

  9. Posted by Sean Power 8th February, 2009 at 7:59 pm

    Thanks for calling us (Akoha) excellent users of Twitter. We’re trying :)

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