The Twitter Problem

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Twitter was down when I checked it yesterday.  Twitter gets overwhelmed often enough.  It also seems to have problems delivering email to my inbox.   If you use it you’ve seen it get overwhelmed a few times already.  I don’t even login to Twitter that much and I’ve seen the “Twitter is over capacity” pages a lot. Apparently the cause is people clicking the refresh button in their browsers.

I’m personally ambivalent about Twitter as a push-marketing channel, which is how most internet marketers try to use it.  I do use it here and there but I haven’t really pursued building a large base of followers or tweeting regularly to them.

“Everybody Talking, Nobody Listening”

If you get enough followers on Twitter you can definitely drive traffic at will. One problemfor most of us is that in order to get a lot of followers we have to follow a lot of other people—who follow us in return (but only because they want us to follow them).  What happens mostly is a phenomenon where everybody is talking but almost nobody is listening.

I am not saying you should not play the Twitter game.  I’m just saying the situation with marketers using Twitter to get web traffic is a little silly due to the self-serving nature of marketers.

Is Twitter Worth The Time Investment It Demands?

Well, that’s up to you.  You can certainly automate some of the process of following other marketers and thus getting them to follow you.  There are dozens of software programs that automate some aspect of Twitter.

How Non-marketers Use Twitter

I actually interview random people I meet, asking what they think about Twitter and Facebook and how they use them.  What I’ve found is that almost nobody is interested in using these sites to find stuff to buy from marketers.

Twitter and Facebook can be very useful for keeping in touch with your group of real friends.  That’s mostly what I use Facebook for, personally.   One young woman told me she and her friends use Twitter to keep in touch on the fly; they use their cell phones to send and receive tweets.

Rather than texting each one of a group of,for example, 20 friends in the local area, this woman might agree with another friend that they would go dancing that evening at a local club.  Then she would tweet about that to her list of friends and some of them would show up at the club.  This is a fine and appropriate use of Twitter.  It saves time and gets the message out clearly to a specific group of people.

If one individual in this circle of friends joined an MLM and started tweeting to his friends about it, they would probably get annoyed and stop following him.  But among marketers there is, on Twitter,  a massive “you follow me; I follow you,” party going on.  The truth is you can sell stuff to other marketers pretty easily—which makes Twitter appropriate for marketing to marketers in many ways.

Twitter Lightening Rod

Another interesting use of Twitter I found is local groups of people using it to congregate and communicate about issues they share an interest in.  I’ve identified activist groups doing this.  In my area I found a group of people who share an interest in organic food and farming.  They  use Twitter to notify each other about farmer’s markets and other events.  The usage is pretty low key, but it makes a point:  it might be a good idea to have different Twitter accounts for different interests of yours.

There may not be much potential to make money directly from a given Twitter group you follow.   But there is a cool side-benefit for marketers—when  you are selective about who you follow and why, you can have these feeds of information that tell you what is going on.  Twitter thus becomes an invaluable research tool which you what people in the group find important.  This information can inform your marketing efforts in mind-boggling ways.   In the past gathering such information would take countless hours of surveying people on the phone or in person.  Today it’s fed to you in 140-character info-bites.

“Great Salespeople Listen More Than They Speak”

With Twitter most of the marketers are talking, but few are listening.  When you listen to and grasp the way people want to receive information and what they want to know about, you become empowered to give it to them.  Then you can wrap your advertising messages in contextually appropriate packaging for your market.

Today’s marketplace can feel like a sand dune shifting under your feet.  Knowing where to put your energy can be a real challenge.   Just charging ahead and following marketing fads like Twitter may or may not work for you—but if you study human nature and learn to give people what they really want, then you’re really on to something.

It shouldn’t surprise you that resistance and apathy towards advertising is at an all-time peak.  The major reason is because most advertising is harshly interruptive and people resent advertisers impinging on their time. They can switch the channel or go to another web-site or video so very quickly with the internet.  For this reason you should not expect to win at marketing by hitting people over the head telling them what you want to sell.

The post author, Loren Woirhaye writes sales copy and creates marketing systems for business clients who want to slash customer acquisition costs and position their businesses For 20%-30% sales growth in the next 12-18 months. He writes regularly about marketing and life at his Entrepreneur Blog.