Archive for December, 2009

I know, I know. Twitter is the joke of the moment among the online elite. It’s micro-blogging in 140 character bursts, nothing special. It attracts users who are more interested in chatting for the sake of chatting than it does anyone else. The so-called Twittersphere is filled with important stuff like random cubicle-dwellers talking about the need for a roll of Tums after a Taco Bell lunch.

Heck, the biggest story to break on Twitter lately was a not-all-that-hot picture of Demi Moore’s backside, shared by Ashton Kutcher. Ashton Kutcher. For a lot of people, that’s reason enough to think of Twitter as a joke.

It isn’t, though. Here are three good reasons to stop laughing about Twitter.

1. It provides a dead easy way to make connections and to network with people in your industry or niche.

2. It all happens in real-time, giving you instant access to conversations about you, your business, products that matter to you and other topics of interest.

3. It allows you to tap into a constant stream of potentially valuable links, resources and ideas in a way that you can’t accomplish otherwise.

Sure, Twitter can seem silly. The way some people use it IS silly. But if you look under the surface, you can see why it’s no laughing matter.

A few years ago, we might’ve said that the quickest way to develop an online premise was to start blogging. One could use a free WordPress or Blogger blog and they’d be up and running within minutes, free of charge. Some might have advocated the creation of a simple static site with a contact page using a template and some cheap hosting.

Today, there’s a new answer and it’s better than the old ones in a lot of ways. It’s Twitter. Twitter, as you undoubtedly know, can be classified as a micro-blogging platform.

It takes about five minutes to set up a free account and you’re up and running. You can quick develop a following of interested parties, it’s easy to promote your Twitter URL and the short-burst style of posting (140 characters or less) makes it ideal for those who don’t have the time, patience or material to be regular bloggers.

If you’re reading this, you don’t need to figure out how to get online fast. You have your answers. The fact of the matter, however, is that many people are going make their first connections via Twitter because it’s so easy. And that, if you think about it, can have some very profound ramifications on the way you market your products or services.

If you want people to see your Tweets on Twitter, you gotta have followers. Obviously, that can drive a person to commit himself or herself to building up the biggest follower base possible as quickly as possible.

One of the most popular techniques to get those followers in place is to start following others. There’s a tendency out there in Twitterland for those who’ve been followed to follow in return. That generous reciprocity can make it easy to build a follower list that will really turn heads.

That’s why following as many people as you can without setting off the “you’re probably a spammer or a bot” alarm is such a popular technique for new Twitter marketers.

There’s a problem with that strategy, though. It doesn’t work very well.

Yes, you get the followers. The problem is that you get a bunch of followers who aren’t really interested in anything you’re saying. They followed out of kindness, ignorance or because they’re not really a human being an they’re programmed to follow when followed.

When it comes time to market to that motley crew, you can guess just how effective it is. It’s like cold-calling the first set of numbers in the phone book or emailing random addresses. It’s not targeted and It doesn’t convert.

You best bet is to focus on building a truly interested and targeted social network. The results will be a lot better than what you get with the “big follow” technique.

Here’s something you should know about the average Twitter user if you’re in the Internet marketing business: The run-of-the-mill member of the Twitter community doesn’t like you very much.

Sorry, but it’s true. And who can blame those folks for feeling that way? They’ve seen their completely legit, commerce-free social networking venue attacked by some of the lousiest spammers in history.

You have the guys with the direct messages featuring affiliate links. You have the robot accounts that work around the clock pounding anyone who was silly enough to follow with link after link after link. You have goons who self-promote to the point of nausea, balancing self-congratulatory Tweets with their sales page links. Ick.

So, unless you’re marketing to other marketers via Twitter, you are going to have to come up with a much better and far more trustworthy approach than the spammers and clowns who’ve already started to poison the pond.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that it’s very possible to do just that. If you’re using Twitter the “right” way, you can overcome a built-in bias against marketers.