How do B2B corporate account followers use Twitter

Recently @towerswatson polled followers regarding their Twitter usage.

https://www.twitter.com/#!/towerswatson/status/177083781054865408

The results are interesting. It is a multi select poll, so users select each of the options that are relevant to them. With moderate reach – so far 60+ responses have been logged.

You can quickly see that the majority of users are reading posts via the twitter app in their mobile device. Then (I am presuming to save data (and roaming) charges, they also use the twitter.com website. Of course if Twitter usage mimics mobile search queries, we should see early morning and evening peaks as users switch from commuting to their work desktop, to their phone, and onto their iPad for the evening.

Whether it is serendipitous or a correlation, the number of Twitter client users is the same as those following a specific hashtag. In my experience many Twitter clients make this experience a lot easier.
So what does this mean for marketers? Around 14% of users are using and advanced twitter client such as Hootsuite or Tweetdeck and the same percentage follow a specific hashtag. The majority, it seems, are still getting to grips with lists, canned searches and what this Twitter thing is all about. Perhaps, those heavy users and early adopters (candidates for an early purchase of the new iPhone or iPad) are present outside of the tech and social media “guru” sphere. And we do see savvy social media users amongst the followers of B2B corporate accounts.

But this also highlights the need for corporate accounts to be specific when defining what their latest tweet is about. There also seems to be a necessity, for accounts surfacing a lot of content, to be timely in their repeat tweets. Not too many as to put off followers, but enough to reach all time zones. Scheduling two sends or more of an article, with a different take, could also reach those users that are not on twitter every day, those that go back to a hashtag or back to their timeline once a week or less.

I’m keen to hear how you interpret these statistics!