Twitter Is Huge? Yes. Twitter Is a Popular Marketing Tool? Probably no.

Twitter sometimes looks like it has been here forever with everyone seemingly using it everywhere and for just about every purpose. And of course we have all seen various marketing and promotion techniques employed on Twitter as marketing and PR people rushed to Twitter to follow their target audiences and to deliver appropriate messages and reach new crowds.

I have explained at least a dozen of times myself to various internet/software/traditional businesses about what exactly they should do on Twitter to use it both efficiently and properly without irritating users with their marketing messages. And while I have seen some of the companies that got this advice from me actually going to Twitter and doing pretty fine over there, to be honest I’d have to admit that not every company that discovers Twitter from my advice will actually want to adopt and use the service for their marketing purposes.

It is quite understandable as some companies realize they will hardly reach their target audience over there while others yet don’t think they actually need to get into all the hassle involved in setting up an account and tracking one’s company reputation as well as actually conversing with users and customers over there as they don’t expect enough feedback and results to substantiate these activities.

And now it looks like despite of the fact that Twitter seems to be everywhere - in all the newspapers and even on TV - it is still only slowly adopted by corporations which is proved by a new study that claims that only 2% of all companies actually use Twitter for business.

The study was conducted by WebTrends, a company working in web analytics and marketing intelligence, and was intended to see how European businesses embrace social networking tools in their marketing activities. The results should be more than surprising to anyone who is constantly targeted by various companies delivering their marketing messages on Twitter, Facebook and everywhere else they can.

So while you may think that social media tools are heavily employed by businesses for promotion, the survey has a surprise for you: in fact, only traditional internet tools are actually heavily used by marketing people so direct mail and web analytics are leading the game with 46% and 37% respectively. Other popular internet tools include online advertising (used by 35% of companies) and optimization for search engines (used in 34% of all cases).

At the same time the latest and greatest tools that we’ve only been hyping for a few years now all hold quite low shares in terms of use for marketing: for example, viral marketing, blogs, and podcasts each have 6% of companies using them with Twitter holding the last position in the list with its 2%.

Of course it is worth noting that the survey only focused on European countries and the results could probably be different in the US as US corporations are known to embrace the latest internet tools way more eagerly than their European counterparts do. But at that the companies that were interviewed during the survey all rely on internet for some part of their business - either selling directly to customers via e-commerce or at least engaging with their customers online in this or that manner.

And while the situation could be different on the other side of the ocean, I think the trend is pretty evident: unlike individuals, corporations are often hesitant to embrace the newest tools (no matter how much buzz they generate in the blogosphere) and only the most advanced and bravest ones will probably venture online to tools like social networks while others will slowly follow them if they see effectiveness.

So if Twitter proves to be a truly efficient marketing tool, marketing people will be sure to follow their target audiences over there and will learn how to use Twitter to gather feedback and attract new customers and whatever it is they want to achieve. But unfortunately for now my impression is that there are probably way too many marketing people over there and much less of those they want to promote something to as at least every third person who follows me has “marketing maven” or “marketing guru” in their bios so all those marketing people should probably now engage with each other and sell their products to each other - unless, of course, they sell consulting services in marketing which is exactly what they sell in the vast majority of cases.