by Thomas Miner

A study conducted by ExactTarget and released earlier this month finds that consumers who are active on Twitter are three times more likely to impact a brands reputation online through syndicated Tweets, blog posts, articles and product reviews than the average consumer.

The survey, titled “Twitter X-Factors,” was conducted by ExactTarget and CoTweet and polled more that 1500 consumers to identify their top motivations for following brands on Twitter. While it seems intuitive that discounts and sales information would take the top spot, the most common reason for following brands online is to receive company and future product information. Other key findings include:

- 20 percent of consumers indicate they have followed a brand in order to interact with the company – more than become email subscribers or Facebook fans for the sake of interaction.

- Men are more than twice as likely as women to follow brands on Twitter to interact with the company (29 percent compared to 13 percent).

- Nine out of the 10 most common motivations for consumers to follow a brand on Twitter involve consumers seeking information from a company.

- Twitter users are the most influential online consumers – 72 percent publish blog posts at least monthly, 70 percent comment on blogs, 61 percent write at least one product review monthly and 61 percent comment on news sites.

Daily Twitter users are 6 times more likely to publish articles, five times more likely to post blogs, seven times more likely to post to Wikis and three times more likely to post product reviews at least monthly compared to non-Twitter users.

Reprinted with permission from Sustainable Life Media