Target the Truly Social People on Twitter and You Will Make More Money on the Internet

Here’s a simple psychology project you can do yourself this weekend in your local High Street. Sit yourself down in the caf?� or restaurant of your nearest department store and do a bit of “people watching”. All you have to do is count the number of shopping bags each person is carrying and the number of people they share a table with. My prediction? When people are alone, they will have fewer shopping bags than when they are in a group. The reason is that shopping is a social experience. Your local department store, for instance, doesn’t just have a restaurant because they can make some extra cash selling burgers and fries and a latte. They also have a caf?� because shopping is a social experience. When shops make shopping social, they do better overall because it encourages more browsing and more buying.

So it is not much of a surprise that when people are really social online, they tend to be more interested in buying things. That’s because their increased level of social activity on the web allows more chatting about purchases, wish lists and so on. Truly sociable people chat happily about their buying behaviors. When we are less social, we chat less about what we buy and more about what we do.

This is borne out to some extent by recent research on the impact of adverts on Twitter. The study has found that when people use Twitter more, they also proportionally engage more with advertising on Twitter. Of the people who logged into Twitter up to 10 times a month less than 2% of them actually engaged with an advert. But over 20% of the people who used Twitter more than 100 times a month engaged with an advert. The study shows that the more social people are, the more they are likely to engage with commercial messages.

Twitter adverts attract social people

This suggests that if you target your commercial messages at social people, you will make more money. It is yet another reason why your business needs to focus on social media in preference to every other kind of online marketing.

So, on Twitter you should spend your time focusing on those sociable people who are your potential customers. These are the ones who Tweet a lot and include other people’s Twitter names – social mentions. These are also the people who Retweet quite a bit too. People who just Tweet, but don’t do either of these activities are not social; they are merely broadcasters. To gain more sales you need to focus on the social people using Twitter.