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.

Hi,
I came across this new communication technology in Pre-Launch, Web 3.0, and would like the opinion of group members. This technology is said to be better than Google Adwards.

I am not a fan of either. Paid search has never really been a great ROI for any small to medium sized business and worse investing in get rich systems that use all hype to market their wares without any substantial evidence that their system can work.

Web 3.0 interesting terminology but it really has nothing to do with marketing. Best Advice roll up your sleeves for some good old fashioned work. Make sure your website is standing on firm ground before commencing any marketing campaigns. SEO is by far the best return your money can buy.

The site doesnt mention anything about from where is it going to generate the leads and how accurate are these leads going to be. There are many database providers who sell such cold lead however difficult part is to convert them into clients.

If you system is going to generate such cold leads its not different from the database providers, again it cant be called better than google adwords as in google adwords atleast the lead is showing interest in your site by clinking it i.e. there are more chances of converting such a lead than converting a cold lead.

Again the link you have given doesnt give any attractive information which would tempt a marketer to give the his / her details. I personally have not given in any details as I would rather first like to know how is that you are going to be more effective than ad words which is quite effective in the lead generation job.

You will start to notice many companies launching “Web-3.0″ or “Semantic-Web” type of technologies now and in the near future. Microsoft has just launched “Bing”, which is a “Semantic-Web” type of technology. You will also start to see technologies that remove the poor functionality and security issues, increase the “Machine Assisting Humans” (i.e., artificial intelligence interface) and gradually start to bring everyone off the ‘less than credible’ www all together. Look for it as it will happen very soon.

Michael I think you are entirely correct we have been seeing a general acceptance for a standard across the Web. Google this week rattled the cages some more calling on developers to assist speeding up the web.

SEO’s like myself have been somewhat dumbfounded in Googles contradictory stance. When the dust settles and we begin to see cleaner, leaner code with the advent of HTML5 and CSS3 , microformats we will bear witness to the future where anything is possible.

This looks like a typical internet viral “cheat”. The business model for the buyer is completely flawless, no real value proposition is in reality delivered by the platform.

In terms of the supposed web 3.0 technology, there is no such a thing. Web 3.0 is a concept, which as this step is under definition, based on sharing capabilities from the different nodes of a network.

I can continue pointing questionable issues, but I think is quite clear…

Your blog is one of the core activities to use to promote your company. This is part of your content strategy and fits with how you position the company. Please take some time to think about what this means for your company.

Your posts have to be contributing to your long term goals. sure, people can offer ideas but this is really part of your marketing strategy.

It is much better for you in the long term that you do this thinking.

Lots of great information on the Curvine blog – it could probably have been spread a little thinner to allow readers to implement your excellent recommendations one at a time!

Future topics: How about standards in web site development – catering for different browsers and screen sizes and formats and then of course usability. Why do so many sites not use CSS? A page that is fine on a standard desktop can be difficult to read on a high resolution wide screen laptop!

Web sites is a very general topic. I would cathegorize the blog into different aspects such as, online sales, content source, multimedia, mobile, networking, broadcasting, journalism, reputation, marketing or extranet (the first ones I got in mind)

Always try to focus on known and good patters/antipatterns on each

A few quick thoughts. First off, who is the target audience for the blog? I’m guessing business owners based on what you said above, so my first thought is to avoid the technical and focus on the business rationale and/or opportunities the web offers. Also, and I see you’re doing this, more content educating business people about what makes for good, effective website communication. (As David said above, usability, design, etc.) What are the questions you’re asked in new business pitches? When I was running an eMarketing agency, I was often asked about how long it takes to build a site, how often you should update it, should they be selling or not. Perhaps your blog can pre-answer some of those questions or provide back-up post-meeting for your point of view.

Also, (and I say this knowing you’re getting up and running so …) you need to brand yourself more on your blog. It’s pretty generic which doesn’t seem like a good thing for a company selling web(site) expertise.

Could include info on how to develop for the mobile web (by that I mean web/wap sites that display well on various kinds of cellphones/devices)…

Forget one-way advertising and one-way relationships. E-Marketing is all about engaging customers and prospects with timely content that is interesting, informative and helps drive sales and new business. So my advice is: “Give ‘em what they came for….”

ALL of the business owners I’ve coached don’t know the difference between webdesign verses web development! Those who fall trap to design are sadly disappointed when they learn about the magical “content management” capabilities they should’ve incorporated from the beginning. Just to name one thing.

Then they need to seek out the right talent – aka a web developer – to implement CM into their already-built-site. But what program was their site written in? You mean there are programs for these things? Yes. Find out which one yours was written in so you can take control of YOUR website that YOU own. Or if you prefer, hire a tutor and learn to write your OWN code with key word excellence! No time for that? Didn’t think so. So hire a creative developer from the get go and don’t forget to blog to attract, convert and connect with your target niche. Once you do that, go back to all the copy that was written on your boring internet brochure by that “writer” you hired and rewrite it so it educates, emotionally hooks, and PERSUADES readers to contact or buy from you NOW. Furthermore, develop your blog into your traditional website so you don’t have prospects chasing you around the web. POST every 3-5 days or forget the blog…

Hope this helps…I’m digging a lot of clients out of a lot of messes I’ve found them in with there “web designers”, and the above reflects the conversations I’m having over and over again.

You have an awesome opportunity to educate business owners, save them thousands of dollars, and earn thought leadership:)

Static websites are not going to die completely but at best augment an interactive location. Xeequa for instance is building online communities for business. So that the business has a blog, a forum (if they want), an events overview, a member or network list… all branded to match their site.

You may want to help business owners understand that people want to get in touch with other people – nit with a page of marketing information.

Consider your restaurant example:
- Have a blog where NOT ONLY the restaurant owner but also the guests can blog
- Have the restaurant relevant events list – PLUS have people RSVP
- Let people discuss things not only about the menu but similar recipes – inspire the chef and the chef may inspire the guests.
You create the sense of hospitality that augments the one of the restaurant
And like you said this can be any other business of that sort.

http://www.xeequa.com
I don’t want to sell you a community but have a look – those communities truly look like the respective websites – totally custom and are fun for the visitors. While we focus on the larger global corporations, we have communities built for restaurants, real estate agents, yacht dealers, marinas, conference organizers…

The businesses I’ve dealth with are interested in using a web-site to promote their business, make money, and with next-to-no effort. They are already working exhaustive hours to keep the business running – even without putting the effort out to work the Internet. Telling them how to work less, instead of more, can be a real advantage.