Twitter vs Email Marketing: 10 Key Differences
Posted on 18. Feb, 2010 in Blog, Social Media
Companies are starting to realize the benefits of utilizing social media tools such as Twitter, but many haven’t considered how this fits into an overall strategy with regards to email. Each method of communication has its strengths and weaknesses, but until now I hadn’t considered putting the two ideas against each other for a direct comparison. This post serves more as a conversation point than list of absolutes.
In no particular order, here are 10 key differences between Twitter and email messaging from a marketing perspective.
1. Push versus pull – spam.
Email marketing has gone through tough times, mainly due to the sheer amount of spam in the system. Emails can be sent by anyone to anyone, and need complex spam filtration mechanisms to weed out the junk mail. Consequently, legitimate email marketers fight for 1-5% open rates and are terrified at being flagged as spammers, but meanwhile the spammers send billions of messages and make profits if less than 1 per million messages generate a sales.
Twitter, meanwhile, is a subscription system, so it’s technically not possible to spam in the same way – you are only broadcasting to people who decide to follow you. Of course, while you can still spam to an extent, but it’s a much faster road to being shut down since (1) individuals can genuinely unfollow a spammer and (2) the account will be suspended if enough suspicious activity occurs.
2. Asychronous versus synchronous.
The phone rings. You’re not there. The caller quits. That’s synchronous, and requires both participants’ simultaneous attention. With email, if you’re not there, the messages build up (as most of us are so painfully aware), so email almost guarantees you a place in the queue for when the recipient has time to catch up. Twitter is more like the former – if a Tweet is sent and nobody hears, did it really happen?
This means there’s more attention given to when Tweets happens, and an ability to repeat the same tweet multiple times a day (like Guy Kawasaki) simply because the audience shifts in this synchronous model. Of course, followers can check your Tweets historically and see that you’re repeating yourself, but very few do. This makes timing and immediacy paramount in Twitter.
3. Brevity versus length.
Emails can last as long as they need to and tweets must live within 140 characters. The importance here is that detailed personal communication will remain loyal to email, where marketing messages have to get to the point very quickly. The traditional email-copy will undergo an enormous shift to cope with such few words design to convince and persuade followers. Rather like a screenplay compared to a novel, Tweets are not easier to write just because they’re shorter. There’s a growing skill in tweet marketing that we’ll see emerge.
4. Audience visibility.
When you send an email to your list, the recipients are blind to each other: the message may arrive in 100 or 100 million mailboxes and we would have no idea. With Twitter, the two lists you have (follower and following) are completely visible. This provides transparency to the size of your audience, of course, but also means that competitors can raid your audience members. Unlike earlier, in point 2, competitors are also more likely to look at the history of your tweets, which would be impossible in email.
The visibility issue is definitely not understood fully by firms using Twitter. It’s one of the reasons that new strategies to grow follower lists are so quickly identified and copied, which isn’t such a problem in email.
5. 1-way versus 2-way communication.
I’ve seen many clients surprised – literally, shocked – when a follower responds to a post and they realize their entire audience can see the response. This is obviously good when the response is positive and terrifying when it’s not. Twitter provides a 2-way communications platform that doesn’t allow for the removal of third-party tweets that unnerve the communications department.
In email marketing, a response can be silenced or publicized depending upon the wishes of the marketer, purely because it’s a one-way broadcast mechanism where any response can be limited between 2 parties.
6. Visual appeal.
The gap between email and the Twittersphere is similar to newspaper advertising versus Google AdWords in terms of graphics. In offline advertising, there’s significant hand-wringing over layout and appearance, whereas in most AdWords campaigns it’s just text (and there’s hand-wringing about the text instead).
The same is true for email, in that a graphically appealing email campaign takes significant time to layout, but Twitter is simply 140 font-less style-less characters. All the tricks and visual cues to draw a reader’s attention in graphic design are irrelevant in the text-only Tweet world.
7. Audience size limits.
With email campaigns, given the largely fixed costs involved, the larger your opt-in list the better. Sending to 10,000 subscribers versus 1 million doesn’t fundamentally affect the distribution cost, but the click-thru rate will be fairly even so the larger list will be more successful.
With Twitter, although some companies like the concept of getting millions of followers, it doesn’t quite work the same way. There’s a quality-versus-quantity issue due to the 2-way nature of the platform, and the messaging impact can degrade as the audience gets too large. Of course, this doesn’t apply to MTV or Disney, but for the vast majority of companies, Twitter will work more effectively with 500 quality relationships than 100,000 phony ones.
8. Distribution style.
Anybody serious about email marketing uses services such as Constant Contact (to ensure CANSPAM compliance, manage lists and easily manipulate professional-grade templates). All tweet distribution of any size goes directly through Twitter’s servers.
9. Reaching the mobile audience.
Largely speaking, email is still a desktop rather than mobile activity, and the majority of email marketing is not opened on a cell phone (which makes sense, since marketers rarely design cell-phone friendly emails). By comparison, Twitter is rapidly becoming a mobile platform, since the short SMS-style messages fit well with the devices and the rich-client apps appearing on iPhone and Android make mobile tweeting easier than texting. Many businesses will find Twitter a better method to reach an audience on the move, especially as GPS and locational data starts to become more broadly used.
10. Communication frequency.
Email frequency is a topic of hot discussion – spam your audience at your peril! So how often should you email? Really, you should ask your audience at the point of subscription, providing a choice between ‘often’ and ‘less often’. Either way it’s sensitive and even opt-in subscribers may feel your communication is too frequent and blacklist you as spam.
Twitter is different: because it’s driven by the concept of “what are you doing right now?”, it’s fundamentally more reasonable for companies to tweet daily (or more often). And you’ll know if your tweeting too much because the followers will leave in droves!
Email and Twitter are two platform with decisively different pros and cons. Does you company need to start or improve an email or Twitter campaign? Contact us at tweets@oneuproar.com.
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