About 20 percent of tweets contain requests for product information or responses to the requests, according to Jim Jansen, associate professor of information science and technology in the College of Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State.
"People are using tweets to express their reaction, both positive and negative, as they engage with these products and services," said Jansen. "Tweets are about as close as one can get to the customer point of purchase for products and services."
Also, while many marketers worry about what people may say about their firms, "a lot of the brand comments were positive," Jansen says.
Jansen, along with IST doctoral student Mimi Zhang, undergraduate student Kate Sobel and Twitter chief scientist Abdur Chowdhury, investigated micro-communicating as an electronic word-of-mouth medium, using Twitter as the platform. Their results were published in the Journal of the American Society for Information Sciences and Technology.
The researchers examined half a million tweets during the study. The team looked for tweets mentioning a brand and why the brand was mentioned -- to inform others, express a view on the brand or something else -- and found that people were using tweets to connect with the products.
"Businesses use micro-communication for brand awareness, brand knowledge and customer relationship," say Jansen.
And though some are uncertain about Twitter's enduring value, Jansen sees Twitter succeeding, because people and businesses are starting to make profits from it, using it as a creative way to market their products.
"It may be right up there with email in terms of its communication impact," Jansen also argues.
No comments:
Post a Comment