Study Shows Twitter Users Are Powerful Consumers

A new study finds consumers active on Twitter are three times more likely to impact a brand’s online reputation through syndicated Tweets, blog posts, articles and product reviews than the average consumer.

The ExactTarget survey of more than 1,500 consumers concludes that Twitter has become the gathering place for content creators whose influence spills over into every other corner of the internet.

Key findings of the research include:

• Twitter users are the most influential online consumers — 72 percent publish blog posts at least monthly, 70 percent comment on blogs, 61 percent write at least one product review monthly and 61 percent comment on news sites.
• Daily Twitter users are 6 times more likely to publish articles, five times more likely to post blogs, seven times more likely to post to Wikis and three times more likely to post product reviews at least monthly compared to non-Twitter users.
• 23 percent of online consumers read Twitter updates at least monthly.
• 11 percent of online consumers read Twitter updates, but do not have a Twitter account themselves.
• 20 percent of consumers indicate they have followed a brand in order to interact with the company — more than become email subscribers or Facebook fans for the sake of interaction.
• Men are more than twice as likely as women to follow brands on Twitter to interact with the company (29 percent compared to 13 percent).
• Nine out of the 10 most common motivations for consumers to follow a brand on Twitter involve consumers seeking information from a company.

Intuitively, these finding make sense to me.  But here is an even more interesting fact to consider. I intentionally surround myself with an audience of professional marketing professionals, educators, writers and business executives. I don’t have too many from the Justin Bieber crowd in my Twitter stream. While these statistics are powerful, they may be even more powerful if the sample was taken from MY tribe … or yours.  Certainly something to think about isn’t it?

Author: Mark Schaefer is a marketing consultant, author and college educator who blogs at {grow}. You can also follow him on Twitter: @markwschaefer.

*This post originally appeared on {grow} and has been reposted with permission.