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Published on: 7/11/2009
Last Visited: 7/11/2009
Mike Volpe, HubSpot's vice president, suggests that people signing up for Twitter have a misconception that they will see value right away.
They wrongly think the value comes from Twitter itself, instead of the people they could be following.
"Twitter itself is not a useful service without followers," he says.
HubSpot, a marketing provider geared toward small businesses, released the first part of its "State of the Twittersphere" report toward the end of 2008.
The statistics were put together based on the data HubSpot collected from Twitter Grader -- a tool that measures the relative power or influence of a given twitterer.
From Twitter Grader, the company claims to have information on more than 4.5 million Twitter accounts.
The 2008 research that HubSpot assembled indicated massive growth, Volpe says.
...
"It's a great time to be a small business today," Volpe says, adding that small businesses are at an advantage when it comes to social media initiatives.
For one, he says, they are more accustomed to networking for lead generation.
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Volpe says the shift toward the listening end is logical for the company.
The social media monitoring tool -- which is sold as part of the HubSpot marketing subscription, rather than an add-on -- tracks a small business's activity on social media sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.
It monitors the company's brand and also clues the company into relevant industry news and trends and activity of competitors, as well.
Since a company's marketing campaigns are also within HubSpot, users can see how many leads they are getting from social media participation.
The key to the HubSpot solution, Volpe maintains, is keeping it easy for small businesses and having multiple tools in one place.
He notes that whereas a large organization might use a monitoring tool such as Visible Technologies or Radian6 and integrate that with its CRM and content management and possibly its blogging platform, a small business doesn't have the means to enable such integration.
Volpe admits there are no customization capabilities with its solution -- it's fairly straightforward.
Realistically, he says, that's what small businesses want and need.
"You can get started in literally minutes tracking conversations, he says."You can't program in your own dashboard, but that's not necessary for small businesses.
They want to get the most benefit out of the limited amount of time they have.
Volpe goes on to say that whereas a big business might have a person or team dedicated to social media management, a small business does not.
"All these small companies want to measure social media and blogs and 'get found online' and attract leads, but it's really hard because they couldn't afford a lot of the solutions out there," Volpe says.
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