According to Statisticbrain.com, there are numerous staggering statistics surrounding Twitter:

• 645,750,000-Number of active registered Twitter  users
• 135,000-Number of new Twitter users signing up everyday
• 195 million-Number of unique Twitter site visitors every month
• 58 million-Average number of tweets per DAY
• 9,100-Number of tweets every SECOND
• $405,500,000-Twitters Advertising revenue for 2013

So How Do I Leverage Twitter?

With stats like that, you might wonder, how do you grow a fan base of that size and how do you keep it running? This brings about lessons on engaging customers, a topic that consumed a trip of 12 Wabash students to the glorious city of San Francisco. After visiting 10 different companies in the San Francisco and Silicon Valley areas, I’ve learned a lot about the importance in engaging customers.

While at Twitter, we learned some really cool facts. The most popular tweet of all time is Barack Obama’s “4 more years” tweet, announcing the successful win of the 2012 election. Other famous tweeters include regular pop stars such as Justin Beiber, Taylor Swift, and Lady Gaga, but also, many athletic stars get a fair bit of twitter attention, including TJ Lang’s tweet acknowledging how terrible the refs were in September of 2012. The most retweeted tweets tend to focus on either humor or news, and ‘brevity is the soul of wit’ definitely plays a part (as if you could get any shorter with 140 characters to play with). Another thing we discussed with Twitter was the next steps for the company. Twitter already has a huge reach, but they are looking to expand even further globally. If you don’t currently Tweet, Twitter wants to know why and how they can convince you to join the network. Twitter wants to engage everyone in the world in their constant flow of quick information.

Standing Out From The Crowd

The world is growing smaller by the minute, with faster travel, more global information, and more connectivity between people. However, with this idea of the world growing smaller, there is a flood of information that absolutely overwhelms everyone as consumers. You can’t walk 10 steps down a city block without seeing 30 different ads for this, that, and the other, each ad absolutely assuring you that you NEED this product in order to be hip, healthy, and happy. So with such an absolute deluge of information, what really stands out in the consumer mind? One word: engagement.

In order to really connect with a customer, companies have to engage with and interact with customers. Twitter, Facebook, and Google are all extremely popular companies because they have such a high level of engagement with their customers. Twitter is constantly blasting with snippets of news, short bursts of shoutouts and new trending topics. Developing companies need to establish an interactive personality with their clients so that the customers really appreciate the product they are engaging with. We visited a company called Red Rock Coffee, a small non-profit coffee shop run by a church. The shop has netted over 1 million dollars in revenue in the last 2 years alone from one location because they share with their customers where the product they are drinking is coming from. Knack, a company focused on creating games to make the evaluation process of recruitment much more streamlined, does the same thing, creating games that require focus from their users.

What Does A Successful Brand Look Like, Anyway?

Successful companies are no longer just the ones that have the coolest logos, the hottest models, or the furthest reach. The most successful companies engage their customers in such a way that the customer not only connects with the company but that the product becomes a regular part of their lifestyle. We live in a generation where people are addicted to Tweeting, drinking coffee, and playing video games. That is because the products they use are interactive. The road to success is paved by creating a lifestyle feel that customers can engage with through your company, where it would feel unnatural to use some other product.