Clients are asking "What are we doing about Twitter?" in a tone and manner that implies they are somehow missing out on the silver bullet that will make their numbers, grow their business, generate press and reward them with social media bragging rights. The reality is that Twitter is simply a point of access to a large and growing audience. It's an empty channel where marketers bear the burden of creating brand awareness, preference and interaction.
To help clients understand what is possible and reasonable, consider these six points as a Twitter sanity check.
You determine reach. You must create followers or fans either by messaging existing customers or prospects or by featuring your account in other forms of communication. Your audience is only as big as you make it. It's not like other media ( think radio, TV or online networks) where you gain instant access to millions of users. And while you can pick up a few extra followers or readers by using the #hashtag convention for specific topics or events, your audience is only as big as you make it. If you have 40 followers – holler out the window. You'll get more attention. If you have a 100,000 followers you've got a market segment. But being on Twitter per se does NOT guarantee an audience.
There is no automatic media multiplier. The vast majority of tweets draw no comments, prompt no re-tweets and die of loneliness. Don't expect your 140 characters to go viral unless they resonate with either your followers or those following the topic of your tweet. Each message you send should try to grow or engage the audience.
Direct marketing rules apply. The majority of tweets are FYIs. Most tweets do not include a call to action. If you want to prompt or stimulate behavior or activity you must target carefully, have a compelling offer and explicitly provide a response mechanism. Even then expect a 1% response rate. You can goose results by using popular personalities or making a whopping offer. But don't expect Twitter, on its own, to sell out a concert, empty a warehouse or fill up a pipeline with leads.
Dell sold computers by making deep discount offers. Whole Foods promotes weekly specials and Starbucks gives stuff away on Twitter. All provoke significant response. Don't expect routine news, an opinion or access to data to pull as hard.
There's no pitch whammy. Loads of journalists tweet and monitor Twitter. But there is no evidence that they are more accessible or more open to PR pitches on Twitter than in any other media or channel. On Twitter, they won't call you names and can't hang up on you. But remember unsolicited direct messages on Twitter are considered SPAM and broad scale pitches on Twitter, or anywhere else, are generally ineffective.
Twitter is a giant ear monitoring the conversation. If you can't access the kind of data-collection and data-mining tools used by the NSA, Twitter is the poor man's intelligence gathering instrument. By tweeting and following individuals and brands and monitoring conversations around specific topics you can get a feel for what's going on, what issues are hot and where you or your brand stands. It's a great way to get a directional snapshot of a marketplace but remember it is not directly representative because 80+ percent of Twitter users never tweet and never respond.
Twitter Aids SEO. Twitter is a semantic platform optimized for search and generating monstrous traffic. Linking your sites to Twitter should give you added search authority and should yield a bump in traffic to your other sites since the search engines highly rate Twitter. Linking to it borrows a cup of this SEO goodness.
Twitter's growth and evolution is interesting. It's not a silver bullet for marketing. It has distinct value but that value is far from all encompassing. It's affordable but there's no automatic pay off or pay back.
