Твиттер в России: какова его роль? (English)

Twitter in Russia is very similar to Schrodinger's cat: literally no one among Social Media specialists talks about it seriously, preferring to discuss Instagram and Facebook problems. But, at the same time, it remains almost the most stable platform with very active audience. In this article, I tried to figure out whether Twitter in Russia should be considered as a tool for effective work with the target audience, and should brands create their accounts on it or not.

Let's start with statistics: according to Brand Analytics, on the basis of November 2019, only 0.44% of the population in Russia used Twitter. For comparison, the social network Vkontakte (vk.com) accounted for 20.97% of Russians, and Instagram — 18.89%.

Unfortunately, Twitter does not provide an opportunity to analyze the age of its audience. So, my colleagues and I take the age from 16 to 30 years as a working hypothesis.

The most popular regions in terms of Twitter usage are Saint Petersburg, Moscow and (attention here) Siberia!

Twitter in Russia (as, probably, all over the world) is considered to be a liberal social network. This means that the content (even from brands) should be created rather carefully. According to my personal experience, the content of Russian brand accounts in Twitter can be divided into two categories:

- Information feed similar to FB, Instagram and other sites with stories about the latest cases and achievements.

- Jokes on current topics, memes and viral posts for a wide audience of the platform.

And if the first category, in general, seems to be quite simple and clear, the second is of the greatest interest to study. So let's talk about them.

As I've said, viral content, flashmobs and jokes on news topics - that's with what brand accounts live in Russia. The main thing here, in my opinion, is not to lose the edge of what is allowed and remember that one incorrect tweet can cancel out all the previous months of work.

What goals can a brand pursue by creating Twitter account? As the main ones, I'd highlight the following:
- Increase brand reach and awareness among a wide audience.
- Increase loyalty to the brand and its products.
- Creating an additional platform for working with negative comments.
- Increase traffic to company's website.

At the same time, the mechanics of achieving the necessary results can be very different and depend only on whether they fit into the company's social media strategy or not. At the same time, in Twitter you don't need to spend a huge budget on advertising to achieve any phenomenal results. Sometimes, it's just needed to make content that will regularly be shared by users. That will give you necessary attention from users. As a living example, I'd like to mention the account of the chain of alcohol stores @krasnoebeloe, whose Twitter has become one of the most popular in Russia without spending a single dollar on promotion.

Another important detail that you shouldn't forget about – working out negative tweets towards the brand. This is extremely important, especially for world-famous brands. A timely and competent response to a negative tweet can not only return potential client back to the company, but also bring a couple of their friends together with it.

By the way, Twitter offers a very convenient and detailed analytics dashboard. There are standard metrics, calculation the engagement index, and even services to find the coolest blogger among your subscribers.

When asked whether brands should go to Russian Twitter, I would rather answer "Yes". If you spend some time analyzing your niche, competitors ' actions on Twitter, and thinking through your content strategy, the results can be quite impressive.

Will be glad to discuss this article in comments below. Hope, it was interesting and helpful.