We do not have statistics, but we suspect that the average Twitter corporate/business user follows a few hundred other Twitter users, and not necessarily out of interest. People follow others for a myriad of reasons: common courtesy (i.e. following back), to increase follower count (i.e. by making others obliged to follow you back), marketing reasons (i.e. to be on a potential customer’s radar), etc. In fact, we ourselves are guilty of using Twitterin the same way. Ergo, the Twitter Timeline is not a real aggregation of content shared by the people or companies in which we are truly interested. The possibly-enormous follower count that we have is a mere by-product of our other goals.

If that is the case, then the number of followers we have is inaccurate in reflecting how many impressions our Tweets get or how widely our message is spread, since engagement is likely to be very low. Impressions, after all, are only useful if people even read our message or click on our links. The fact is that, even if our customers solely follow people or companies in which they are interested, anyone following more than, say, 300 Twitter users would find her Timeline to be overwhelming and thus unappealing.

We propose a known yet frequently-overlooked way of marketing on Twitter: utilize the Mention tag (@) more often. There are several advantages of doing so. First, you are only competing for the attention of the user you mentioned with other users who used the Mention tag. Second, it adds a personal touch to your message, and your audience is likely to respond in some way. Third, it gives us the opportunity to be searched by our audience’s fans, customers, competitors, stakeholders, etc., which may very well lead to other benefits, e.g. partnership opportunities and new customers.

Mentioning specific people is undoubtedly less scalable, but, since it is a more targeted approach, the engagement rate is also likely to be higher overall. This hypothesis has been consistent with our experience using the Mention tag, at least on the receiving end. What has your experience been with the Mention tag?

A recent article by Techcrunch revealed that Facebook Shares are worth nearly three times as much as Tweets when it comes to social commerce. After using both Facebook and Twitter for more than a year, we at Zuupy do not find the statistics surprising, considering that Facebook has the significant advantage of leveraging on our real-life social graph to empower our purchases while Twitter merely relies on our interest graph. Alas, for Twitter, we are still more likely to trust a friend than an industrial expert or celebrity.

One implication of these findings is that Tweets will be perceived as less valuable as social currency. The reason is pretty obvious: the Twitter experience is horrid. First, for professional networking, Twitter generally comprises a body of self-serving broadcasters who are constantly pushing out content of their own and increase their follower count without any intention whatsoever to engage with their followers. Second, the text-only, 140-character nature of Twitter lost its novelty after a while, and, despite recent attempts to support multimedia from Twitter.com itself, it is still a slow and cumbersome process to consume content on Twitter. Even the infamous one-liner updates achieved via Facebook Likes monetize better than Tweets.

The lesson for us is clear: focus on Facebook first, and then explore Twitter. Google recently announced its social search feature, which, although more focused on Twitter than Facebook (Facebook profiles are not crawlable after all), underscores the importance of the social graph in empowering search results. In general, especially with consumers, “Facebook is the people you went to high school with. Twitter is the people you wish you went to high school with.”

Also, with recent studies showing that Facebook social commerce is really about deals and not engagement, the lesson for us is perhaps to focus on Facebook and deals simultaneously. Indeed, the launch of our latest competitor, CrowdBunny, provides testament to the opportunities available in the area of Facebook group buying. We have launched a couple of months before them, and we are just excited to see some validation in terms of competitors entering the space. We see social commerce as focusing on Facebook and group deals in the near future, as evidenced by our Facebook group buying solution. What do you think social commerce will look like in the near future?

The original purpose of Facebook Likes and Tweets is, expressly, to share and, impliedly, to show endorsement. Over time, these social media sharing tools have gradually evolved in their application to – in addition to their original purpose – serve as a form of currency for social media marketing. The implication of this shift is that consumers begin to treat sharing things on social media as something not to be given up so easily, particularly when it comes to products and services, or, equally possible, as something to be given up more easily than normal to achieve certain limited ends.

There are several models that use Facebook Likes or Tweets as currency; the Pay with a Tweet model allows consumers to purchase items by “paying” for it via a promotional effort, while Facebook-based deals applications, such as Sears’ WishTogether and Walmart’s CrowdSaver, adopt a Groupon-like model that delivers deals upon the achievement of certain Like thresholds for said deals. Of course, when social media sharing is treated as a medium of trade, the average endorsement value of social media sharing goes down, since the sharer is most likely sharing for a non-endorsement purpose.

It remains to be seen if Likes and Tweets can serve as a viable currency in exchange for goods, services, deals, etc. What is predictable is that social media sharing – especially with regard to ecommerce – will increase in quantity, but decrease in quality, as more people will share for selfish reasons and thus suppress signal-to-noise ratio, arguably one of the most important yardsticks for any social media platform.

Twitter is huge, but increasingly, people are starting to doubt its future prospects. As big as it is, Twitter trails behind its contemporary, Facebook, in terms of size, by a factor of three. I have often asked people around me who are users of Facebook but not users of Twitter why they do not use Twitter. Almost unanimously, they say, “I don’t get it.” Probing further about what they “don’t get” merely confirms my own theories.

They “don’t get” the point of broadcasting their thoughts when nobody is listening. They “don’t get” the point of sharing content when nobody is responding. They “don’t get” the point of following the updates of strangers who have very little impact on their own lives. In other words, there is very little “social” (which I define as “reciprocity”) in Twitter. Nobody cares about anybody; everybody is too busy tooting their own horn, oblivious to the fact that nobody is listening. Marketers are peddling their product offers, publishers are promoting their content, and casual individuals are indulging in self-satisfying monologues. It is a market with too many producers and too few consumers.

The true reason for Facebook’s relative success over Twitter is that Facebook encourages reciprocity. Users can “Like” stuff and comment directly on content. This creates a cycle of two-way activity that sustains a thriving community. Twitter, on the other hand, is not built for conversations, especially in the way that it chronicles conversations. The focus is on content creation, not on meta-content activity (other than retweets). Content creators will stop creating content when there is no reaction from the community. Adding a “comments” section for each tweet, for instance, would tremendously increase engagement and further spur content creation.

Of course, Twitter is beginning to introduce some interactivity, with its new makeover. My guess is that these changes alone will not make Twitter mainstream, because the lack of optimization for two-way communication is still unaddressed. Get that issue sorted out, and perhaps the average Joe might start “getting it.”