Brand Amplification (and Audience Passivity) Up on Twitter

A recent study by Bazaarvoice suggests that more and more of people’s mentions of brands are not original from them but are retweets of updates from the brands themselves. That’s mixed-to-good news for brand publishers since it means that their pure, unadulterated message is being amplified more and people are weighing in with their messy opinions less. The reason I say “mixed” is that it means yeah, there’s probably less negatively but that comes with less positivity as well. If people aren’t feeling passionate enough in either direction then there’s a potential problem with the company that’s doing the publishing since attitudes may be veering toward the lukewarm.

Moving outside the view of what that means for brands who are doing the publishing it seems this also may say something about how the use of Twitter by the average person is changing. It’s hard for me to read this and not think it’s part of a shift toward Twitter becoming more of a passive platform for those in the “audience,” who are increasingly being asked to see it as a consumption took and not something for them to add original content to.

Twitter obviously wants more second tier engagement if the reports of the company testing out replacing the Favorite feature with a Like button. It’s a much lower bar to clear for someone to say they “Like” someone’s update than that it’s a “Favorite” and therefore has the potential to be much more widely used. It also mimics, obviously, behavior that’s already widespread on Facebook.

Back to the the study, it also shows that the number of followers the average person talking about a brand has is rising and that the number of updates about a brand that also include a link is dropping. So combined the picture shows that more people are amplifying a brand’s messaging (often without a link) in a much more passive way to a broader swath of people.

Again, there are upsides to this for brand managers and downsides as well. But the whole study is worth taking a look at as a picture of how corporate audience engagement is continuing to shift.

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