Ahhh, Twitter. For better or worse, the service has gained major exposure from Ellen, Oprah, P. Diddy, and its most popular user, Ashton Kutcher. Additionally, in a desperate attempt to appear young and relevant, news organizations such as Fox, CNN and MSNBC have jumped on the bandwagon as well, shoving their twitter names down our throats and creating a television format based entirely around reading tweets from their followers. Of course, with this increase in exposure, the marketing folks come pouring out the woodwork: from self-promoting freelancers to corporate twitter accounts, it seems I can’t send out a single tweet without some spambot kicking in and auto-friending me. But how effective is twitter as a marketing tool?
Twitter is built with the cards stacked against mass-marketing, at least the spammy kind. You have to confirm who you get updates from- that doesn’t help the marketers at all. Secondly, it sets the tone of the conversation: “What are you doing?” Not “What would you like to buy?” But third, and most important, is the level of intrusion.
There are various levels of intrusion when it comes to marketing, and these determine how receptive people may be to your voice. Send me a mailpiece, and I can ignore it (which is actually part of direct mail’s success- it depends on you placing the ad on your coffee table, where it will haunt you until one day you look at it and realize, “hey- I do need an oil change!”). Call my house phone, and I may get a bit angry- but in truth I’m used to it, and may respond. Call my cell phone, and forget it- that’s just too personal.
Twitter falls in cell phone territory. I use Twitter to chat with friends, colleagues, and my readers. I use it to share useful information with others, and find information from those who are doing the same. The few cases where I did sign up to Twitter marketing alerts, I did so not because they blind followed me, but because it was part of an existing web campaign. I get NewEgg daily deals because they clued me into it, and I shop there a lot.
But not everyone uses Twitter effectively. You need to bring your A-game to have an effect in the Twitterverse. You need to make sure you’re bringing something to the table that people WANT. And remember, it’s an opt-in system so let your audience CHOOSE to follow you by integrating Twitter with your existing campaigns, not by randomly following them and hoping they follow back.
And one last note: please, please, PLEASE don’t tweet about how to get more followers. That totally misses the point. Twitter- like anything else social- isn’t about number of followers, it’s about quality.
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