New Study Reveals That 20% Of Tweets Mention Brands or Products

With about 6 million active users daily and predictions of more than 20 million users by the end of the year, Twitter has become the next big thing on the Web. Even though Twitter is still in its early stages of adoption, he sees it being around for a while. This is mainly because people and businesses are starting to make profits from it, using it as a creative way to market their products.

Jansen, Mimi Zhang, Kate Sobel conducted the study along with Twitter chief scientist Abdur Chowdhur. They examined half a million tweets, looking 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.Their results were published in the Journal of the American Society for Information Sciences and Technology.

Results from the study found that users employ Twitter to inquire about product information. About 20% of the tweets contained product information in the form of asking and providing, thus giving companies a "rich source" of information concerning issues and questions that customers have regarding its products.

"People are using tweets to express their reaction, both positive and negative, as they engage with these products and services [...] Tweets are about as close as one can get to the customer point of purchase for products and services." said Jansen, associate professor of information science and technology, College of Information Science and Technology, Penn State. "A lot of the brand comments were positive," he said. "There are some good products out there, or at least products that people are happy with."

Source : Tweeting is more than just self-expression