Business, Featured - Written Friday, August 27, 2010 by Denis Hancock - 3 Comments

You don’t have to engage in conversations to succeed on Twitter

It seems that every day a new article (or blog post) comes out about how brands are using Twitter wrong. This article from a few weeks ago delivers this message in a typical way – saying that Twitter consists “primarily of two-way conversations – marketers can be doing so much more to participate fully in this two way medium” (and the Twitter whitepaper it links to is fairly interesting). Marketers are being told to engage and converse – and to do so quite frequently.

But I have a different perspective, and believe that many brands (and companies) can succeed on Twitter without necessarily engaging in conversations, or being particularly active. Not only that, but I believe the hypothesis that customers necessarily want to be engaged in conversations with brands needs to be challenged, as I don’t think it’s true as a blanket statement.

I’ve been doing a lot of research on this recently, but today I’ll just provide a few different Twitter accounts that appear to be doing very well, in terms of followers, without engaging in conversations (or doing any of the other things most people are recommending they “should” do on Twitter).

@woot:  A quick glance at their Twitter page reveals they typically post once a day (occasionally 2 or 3 times). This post is a link to a daily deal. There is simply no conversation or two-way engagement. They have over 1.6 million followers (#90 overall, between Biz Stone and Penn Gillette), and have been listed 7,000 + times. This makes woot one of the most popular brand accounts on Twitter (out of companies that actually sell stuff).

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