While most people are looking at Snapchat as the momentum shift for the youth market, I have started seeing a large trend with young people on Twitter. The under 20-year-old market is a huge segment on Twitter right now and it is a very easy and simple communication platform for your brand to access and use. I think Twitter has a platform that provides easy and natural communication. Twitter is an open conversation platform very similar to the automotive forums that were popular years ago. You can compare this against other social media platforms that are very one-on-one conversation centric.
The aftermarket automotive industry tends to ignore Twitter as a whole but some people to do use it see great benefit. With @wreckedmagazine account I live broadcast and tweet about every single Formula Drift event in the season. This years Long Beach Round 1 weekend saw the most engagement for a race I have seen in the years doing live blogging from a race.
More and more in recent weeks I have struck up conversations with friends and family who are in the age group and they all say their friends are big into Twitter and it’s the most popular application at their school. Pretty crazy and counter intuitive almost to what we are being told as marketers right now in the industry.
Twitter makes it very easy to upload videos, photos, host polls, and promote sales through its platform. Even if you are creating long form video content for YouTube and Facebook, I suggest putting together a preview video for Twitter. Uploading the video directly to Twitter will allow it to be playable from the timeline or mobile application of the software as well, so please keep that in mind.
If the products you sell skew to a younger audience or the vehicles you make parts for are attractive to the youth demographic I highly suggest you put some more of your marketing hours into Twitter. The younger kids are pouring into Twitter and some of you desperately need them to purchase the products you want to sell. You will see some excellent value here arriving earlier and taking Twitter more seriously than your competition.