140Char

The answer appears to be Yes, judging by a survey by Peter Sorgenfrei and Warren Sukernek which was published on Twittermaven today.

From 208 Twitter users in the survey, 97% responded that brands should engage with customers on Twitter, 88% have a better impression of brands that engage with them on Twitter, 80% would recommend a company based on Twitter presence, and 84% would reward a company by purchasing from them.

But keep in mind 90% would frown upon poor or inappropriate Twitter usage by a brand.

The survey is embedded below under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 licence. See more details on this survey and how it compares with the previous year on Twittermaven.
Twitter Brand Perception Survey 5 09

I didn’t realise that Twitstat has a list of the clients which post most frequently to Twitter (that are tracked by @twitstat), until I saw the recent list published by Mashable.

The web interface tops the list at 29.57%, then it’s

• Tweetdeck 10.58% (Uber client for Twittering and monitoring)
• Twitterfeed 5.54% (Automated website and blog feeds)
• Twhirl 4.92% (Effective Twitter client)
• Twitteriffic 3.79% (Twitter client for mobile).

And the next four places are all mobile clients, with Twitpic in tenth.

Warren at Twittermaven took things a little further by aggregating the mobile, desktop and utility categories, and pointing out more people use mobile to post than desktop clients. One of his posters has also pointed out that the data could be misleading as people might post through the full web page on mobile internet.

But I’d expect the trend to be fairly close to reality. A mobile-optimised experience is likely to be an easier ’sell’ than moving from the web interface to a client. And although early adopters and corporate Tweeters can find huge value from tools like Tweetdeck,  that’s not the average Twitter user.

The top 10 applications account for 70% of usage, which conforms to The Long Tail. Friends of 140char on the list include MrTweet at #40 and disapointly Cesare’s great Posty client is down the list at #211.

It appears that the automated plugin isn’t quite working correctly, so here’s an authentically manual list:

Twittermaven: The Invisible Twitterman: Or how one man’s shameless self-promotion appears to be generating a similar response to Magpie adding adverts to tweets. “First Facebook, now Twitter. The Powerful Promoter, Matt Bacak, has taken himself to the top of the social media networks yet again, this time beating out 99.9% of the fastest growing site’s members”

Except it turns out that actually he hasn’t.

DownloadSquad: A few days later, a better notifier: Ding, It’s Up: A new service which will let you register a site which is currently down, and then Tweet you when it’s back online.

Wikinomics: Keep your plants healthy (or alive) with Twitter’s help: The perfect way for your spouse or partner to make sure they get back from a vacation to find all their beloved greenery hasn’t withered away. For $99 , a plant can send you Tweets such as “Water me, please!”.

Logic + Emotion: Can you retweet that:

'Can you retweet that?' by David Armano at Logic + Emotion

In a slightly odd pairing, political eco figure Al Gore and successful professional blogger Darren Rowse both had microblogging news to unveil while I was off on vacation. And the less significant part for me personally, is that Al Gore has his own Twitter account.

More significant was the news that the man behind Problogger and one of four behind the B5media network, has launched TwiTip, a new blog dedicated to Twitter Tips.

Uh-oh.

Darren’s being pretty open about the process and techniques he’s using for the new blog, but the fact he’s already seeing up to 2000 users per day, and has over 1300 RSS subscribers within a few days due to his previous success and fame could be a bit depressing! I have to admit being tempted by Web 1.0 Darkside thinking a little.

Web 1.0: ‘Well, the game is over now. Him and another couple of A-listers will just hoover up the entire audience.’

Web 2.0: ‘Every new blog/person is a good thing for attracting and engaging more people and providing new perspectives.’

Web 1.0: ‘But he’s got a larger audience in a week than 140char has after 6 months.’

Web 2.0: ‘Doesn’t matter. It’s just a reason to ensure I work harder on making this place different and valuable enough that it succeeds in it’s own right and stands out – and maybe Darren will send some traffic by!’

At the end of the day, I wish Darren all the success he’ll doubtless get, and it hasn’t changed my thoughts on the future state of the site too much – initially it looks like he’s continue his tactic of providing great tuitional and instructive guides etc, which will be just as useful to me as other people – and I was already intending to take this blog in a slightly different direction anyway. Especially as I like to play and break new apps and sites, rather than feeling like I’m writing a game guide.

The only thing that does disapoint me a little is the fact Darren is publicly asking for submissions for Twitips and has already received loads of content, which is doubtless coming from Problogger readers who see a chance to get more coverage for their own websites and blogs – it might have been nice to have seen some recognition of the sites already here like Microblink, Twitterapps,  Twitterholics, Twittermaven, etc.

And obviously if anyone, A-list or otherwise, fancies being involved in a site dedicated to microblogging, you’re always welcome to get involved here!

Found via Twittermaven is the news that Twitter is the fastest growing social networking site, according to Nielsen Online. Traffic has grown by 343%, from 533K to 2.3M in the space of 12 months!

More worrying is the fact that a site I don’t like for previous spamming-type techniques, Tagged, is second. It’s followed by Ning, Linkedin and Last.fm. Largest on the list is Facebook at 39M, but all the top ten are witnessing above 57% growth year-on-year!