Why a Lot of Small Businesses Don't Need to Use Twitter

eMarketer reports that 9% of the adult (18+) US Internet population currently uses Twitter at least once a month. 

Their new forecast substantially lowers the Twitter use forecast they made last April.  Key quote from their press release:

“Twitter has continued to gain traction but at more moderate levels than we had expected,” Verna said. “Our updated figures put Twitter usage in a clearer perspective than published data showing hundreds of millions of Twitter accounts, or site traffic stats that include visitors who browse public tweets on Twitter.com but don’t actually use the microblogging service.”

In other words, the hype around Twitter exceeded the reality. 

Don't get me wrong.  9% of online users is over 16 million people.  That's a lot of people and Twitter is a great marketing tool if your customer base is using it.  It's also valuable for other tasks.  For example, we use Twitter almost every day for information discovery.

But it also means 91% of adult online users aren't using Twitter, so a lot of small businesses won't find their customers or prospects there. 

Our advice to small businesses on Twitter continues to be the same it's been since Twitter was launched:  learn about and experiment with Twitter, test it for a mix of business purposes, measure your results, and use it if you're getting a strong ROI relative to other uses of your time and money. 

Don't use it just because of the hype. 

Comments

[online coupons]

You said right that twitter has not blogging service is a factor for that. In my view small business sites has not as much healty against their site as the big one. They have to concentrate to bring their sites in search engines and get more traffic which they required.

[Cleveland Social Media]

Totally disagree. Twitter is publishing more real-time search engine results than any other website. Being a part of Twitter means the potential to rank better in search.

Just do a search for something local and see how Twitter recommends tweets from locals that are connected on Page 1.

This will only increase as things become more real-time and locally focused.

I say tweet on SMB!

[Leale's Auto Repair in San Jose]

Precisely they don't really might be needing it for instance. For the reasons that there are a lot of social networks which is a lot more popular and that can give some good benefits to their marketing businesses.

[business phone systems]

Yes the figures and you analysis is quite right. I also started tweeting 2 years ago but i didn't found it as help as Facebook is. So i dont use twitter any more. Facebook is a lot better way interact with you customers.