I’ve restrained myself from commenting on Twitter until I had something I thought would be useful to say about it.
For those who may have heard the term but not know what it is, Twitter is a free “microblogging” service for posting text+links messages of up to 140 characters only. Each post is called a “tweet”. Subscribers are called “followers.” Because of the short messages, sending and receiving tweets from cell phones is popular. It also makes it a friendly medium for rapid updates.
Initially it was used by teens and twenty-somethings to stay in touch with all their friends at once. Like telling everyone you are now at the grocery store.
When it exploded earlier this year, and people started raving about it as a marketing tool, my first question was “What percentage of this is pure hype?” And the next question is how would it be actually useful to a business.
Answer to the first question is “a lot of it is hype.”
But on the second, there are a couple of ways it can be VERY useful:
1. As a way of keeping customers and other interested persons informed, if you are in a fast-moving business.
We have a client who has two large fishing boats, and this is a huge town for fishing. In fact, Tampa Bay is really the fishing capital of the U.S. So there are zillions of people who would like to know where the fish are biting – TODAY.
Twitter is perfect for that kind of thing.
2. As a way of developing business.
This is of course what people really are hoping to gain from Twitter as a business tool. And it certainly has potential that way, depending on the type of business you are in, and how creative you can be.
Developing business using Twitter is totally dependent on getting followers. I’m not going to get into how to get followers, but I am going to point out one important fact:
The fact that someone is following you doesn’t mean they are a potential prospect – or even that they are interested in you.
This stems from the fact that people follow others as a marketing action. If you log into Twitter and click on “followers”, you’ll see recent tweets from your followers. So, many people follow thousands of others in hopes those people will see their tweets and be interested in what they offer.
It’s the same as with visitors to a website. You can get thousands of visitors to a website who are never going to turn into customers.
And, as with all marketing methods or channels that are new – brand new, or just new to you – no matter how good they sound, they are experimental until proven out – FOR YOU.
So tweet away – just don’t put all your eggs in one basket and count on it to save the bacon or make you rich. Maybe it will – so give it an honest try – but put the emphasis on the “maybe.”