Just four years after its founding, Twitter now boasts more than 100 million users that log a collective 65 million tweets each day. Beyond that, the site records 190 million site visitors per month—an indication that a large volume of people consume content on Twitter, even if they aren’t participating in the conversation themselves.

With this exponential explosion of attention, marketers would be straight up dumb not to try to join the conversation. However, after all the self-aggrandizing and countless essays in the PR industry recounting the importance of twitter and engaging your audience, the ugly fact remains: Twitter users simply don’t care about your brand.

A new report by digital agency 360i concluded that the vast majority of Twitter mentions really are as mundane as the critics have poked fun in the past. Despite marketers' embrace of the medium, brands are finding themselves on the outside of the conversation. Of the 90% of Twitter messages sent by real people -- the other 10% come from businesses -- only 12% ever mention a brand, and most of those mentions are of Twitter itself.

The most mentioned brands on Twitter tend to be there because they genericized trademarks present in daily conversation (like saying I “googled” something, or “rollerbladed” last night), not because of anything the brand is or isn't doing on Twitter.

Further, only 1% of consumer tweets that mention a brand are part of an active conversation with that brand, meaning marketers are, for the most part, conducting one-way conversations — the opposite of the way consumers often use Twitter.

A few useful thoughts and conclusions that did surface:

1. Showing up isn't enough: the idea that Twitter is basically an advanced RSS feed doesn’t do enough to build followers. i.e. Twitter is NOT a good press dissemination service.


2. 43% of individuals' tweets are conversational and 24% are status updates… meaning that you really can listen to your audience on a mass-scale about their daily habits, likes and dislikes. Of course you need an expensive digital measuring service to help you with this… enter 360i


3. This study shows how Twitter is largely a reflection of everyday conversation. Twitter is a platform dominated by the voice of the consumer and consists primarily of two-way conversations — the real value for marketers who participate on Twitter is to create a personal conversation with consumers. (An expensive proposition for sure — worth the investment of human time & effort? Hard to tell.)

(most Tweets are personal updates or casual conversations)