As with all of my posts, I promise this one will be short and to the point. How effective is Twitter as a marketing tool?
By now most of us, if not all, are very familiar with the micro-blogging tool Twitter. The term micro-blog simply means that the number of bits in any one post cannot exceed some preset limit. In Twitter’s case it is capped at 140. So basically, any tweet you tweet will be just a little longer than the subject line in an email.
That’s great! Who has time to read a bunch of wordy garbage? How does it work? Basically you are forced to sit in front of your computer and type small messages into a tiny comment box. You can simply make a comment, post a link or video or whatever. Almost like facebook on speed. Interestingly, you are forced to look at others tweets because they are on the same page where you type and run simultaneously with yours.
That is Twitter’s trick. If you write, you also read. So, technically, all of your followers should be reading your propaganda also, right? Marketing dream tool? Probably not. Why? Well, in my humble opinion and to put it bluntly, Twitter has allowed itself to be compromised. In what way, you ask? By allowing posts to be made by auto posting services, which means that some bot is “reading” (term used loosely) your posts on the other end and not a real person.
I will not name any of these services because I actually use some of them and they can serve an important function. But, how do you know if the person on the other end is real. Simply. Just scan the tweets sent to you and count how many state “via web” at the bottom of the tweet. Odds are a very small fraction of them are actual people…i.e. “customers”. Just to throw some simple numbers around.
After counting the number of “via web” tweets out of the last 100 on my Twitter homepage, a grand total of six tweets were “via web”. That means that only 6% (numbers will vary from account to account) of my followers were human or a piece of software tweeting from a PC. That is absolutely unacceptable! For an internet marketer, that traffic is almost completely valueless and completely diluted to the point of being ineffective.
Yes, it appears that Twitter has indeed been compromised! It’s spammers spamming spammers. Twitter should seriously consider discontinuing it’s allowance of these auto-posting services if it wants to survive the next wave of competition which is assuredly coming. I think it is time to start over from scratch with Twitter. That means unfollowing anyone who uses an auto-posting service. Why? Because I want people reading my tweets, not machines. As a bonus, read this post on automating Twitter so that you do not waste a ton of time on it. Related posts:
Source: Marketing Tool Analysis – How Effective is Twitter? | TheBitBot Organic SEO Services Blog
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