Is twitter a waste of time or a real marketing tool ?
Many of us spend time following and hoping to be followed on twitter. Many businesses are saying they spend so much time on twitter with no real impact. With over 60 % of people who sign up on twitter to abandon it within 30 days and never come back. Is twitter delivering new customers/patrons/clients/leads to your website/restaurant or company? Do you see it as hype and is twitterdelivering results to you. Share your experience with others…
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I’ve been on Twitter for more than 3 months and haven’t seen any hard results yet. We’ve had only one sale directly from Twitter. I do think it can take time to see results, plus I’m learning a lot from other posts, so I will stick with it for the time being and re-evaluate in a few months.
I find Twitter to be helpful. I’ve only seen a couple sales come directly fromTwitter, but like Ms. Klapper has stated, it can take time to see results. At the very least, we’ve noticed more traffic to our Web site as a result of using Twitter.
According to Techcrunch.com, Twitter still gets about 32 million visitors a month, so something has to be happening. That is a lot of marketing potential.
will you share what volume of visitors translate to actual sales for your company?
I cannot say whether it does or doesn’t. But what I do know is that it would be very difficult indeed to measure sales derived directly from Twitter. There are so many other variables involved in social media. E-marketers are better off building a profile from the Twitter users behavior (Tweeters AND followers) and then target market to those segments. This is virtually impossible to do without using sophisticated tools.
We know that there are two kinds of Twitter – sale Twitter and relationship Twitter. Results should be measured accordingly..
Twitter is emerging and has not reached a critical mass. A reason people abandon it could be because it doesn’t deliver as well on the promise of staying connected as other social media sites like LinkedIn and FaceBook. These channels are far better for staying connected to individuals as we usually have more to share with colleagues, friends and family than 140 characters allows.
Twitter is a better resource for very brief status updates or staying up-to-date on announcements from blog posts, industry information, organizations and businesses. I enjoy the media and entertainment tweets from favorite channels, news outlets, shows, musicians and comedians. I could see it being useful for following the latest deals at my most visited e-Commerce sites (ebay, amazon) and brick retailers/restaurants (meijer, starbucks). But, many of my most frequented businesses and organizations aren’t tweeting yet. When fast food restaurants, gas stations, schools, fitness clubs and grocery stores start sending out tweets more people will find it more useful.
Well i believe it depends on how you use it.Your mind must be open to possibility’s. your mind must not be limited.it depends on the user.so the question is ,is Twitter, a good tool or not.my answer is yes it is a decent tool to use,as well as others.
I like the social media marketing plan post, however like karlis said,it depends on your objective.
In terms of time involvement, twitter still requires a lot of time in order to execute it.
The question then arises, in terms of quality of followership. Do many of us third party tools to manage our followership or we do it naturally?
I’m still curious for your average small business (like mine let’s say) what my goal should even be. When I blog, I understand my goal – let’s people know more about me and also I do better in SEO. On LinkedIn – that’s somewhat obvious. But whether I should have a Facebook Page devoted to my business – same for a Twitter page – that’s just not as clear to me.
The thing that this presupposes is that one has a significant number of followers – and has somehow managed to amass that in a “time-effective” way. As a normal guy with a family and a job (and a life), I have found it difficult to keep up “followings” on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter – forced to pick one I’ve chosen LinkedIn and my own blog. with Facebook following behind that. I suppose if I found Twitter more my style then it would follow more naturally as a marketing tool for me. But since I don’t follow other’s tweets I can hardly expect to become an avid user of the service – try as I might for business reasons. Sort of like golf for me.
I’ve seen consultants building their personal brand on Twitter by what they choose to ReTweet and post. Also effective can be to post titles and links to your blogs and Web pages to help generate traffic.
Facebook? Targeted ads might be appropriate. Unless you’re a group, network, membership organization, cause, business or individual that people would join, support or fan I’m not sure just a business page is all that useful for right now. But, I’ve been targeted on fb by ads from different businesses including consultants that have made an impression. I haven’t been inclined to click through, but I saw them and thought, “hey there on fb… that’s kind of cool.”
I can remember very similar debates in 1995 and1996 from different camps regarding building Web sites. “It takes so much time, how many resources should we devote, what’s the impact, results?…” By 1997 and 1998 everyone was clamoring to establish a Web presence. Sure there was the .com bubble. But, look where we are now and how the Web has matured. It seems almost ludicrous now that we even questioned jumping in water. And, the social media channels now are at a similar nascent stage that the ‘World Wide Web’ was back in 1995.
By the way, have you seen this yet?
http://wave.google.com/
Lots of great comments here. Social Marketing, especially Twitter and Facebook are to the overall marketing game what the internet was 15 years ago. Lots of advertising and marketing managers dont understand it, so they dismiss it. I think it is brilliant! Who do we trust – our friends. And how do we communicate with our friends – social networking. I think a better question is, with the possible exception of AARP Magazine, is print advertising still viable.
What you need to ask is what do you want to get out of social media – what “results” are you expecting? …
If you want to meet random new friends – go on it and search for activities etc that interest you and find out who is tweeting about them – then follow them.
If you want to engage with like minded people, then follow those in a similar industry/ profession. This is how i use twitter – i keep up to date with latest marketing trends and RT interesting articles i come across.
For company purposes - twitter is a great (and free) way to raise your company profile, improve web visitor statistics (by linking to items on your website) and also creating a personality and voice for your company. Who are you targeting? – potential recruits, media, customers?
As with all marketing – unless you have an idea of your objective or target audience – whatever tool you use isn’t going to work.
Some of the key take aways from this discussion are
1.Marketers must have a clear a objective before getting on the bandwagon oftwitter e.g Are you looking to use twitter to recruit new leads, connect customers, send news to media, or just make friends. Must be clear on the objective.
2.Must be clear on target audience: this is almost the same as the previous point. The difference is who do you want to talk to on twitter.business associates,follow like minded people, may be people in your industry.
3.Must manage your time. It can be really addictive and easy to waste time ontwitter. Can use tools like Twello etc to automate things.Like google targeting, you should be able to use keywords to target your audience.
4.Twitter can really deliver traffic. Make sure your bio and URL is simple and clear.Like a business card. The bio section I understand is spidered by google bots.
5.Retweet good articles to your follows, this makes you relevant to others and can increase your followership.
These are some of the key items. Feel free to add more guys. It is a good discussion.
