I first played with twitter over a year ago, followed some celebs, and tweeted the sandwiches that I was eating for lunch. I soon became bored and forgot about it. 3 months ago I returned to twitter hoping to use it as an effective marketing tool for my b to b (business to business) blog. I researched the successful tweeters, read everything I could find and bought some twitter training authored by social media experts.
On the face of it, it looked fabulous, I get people to follow me who are interested in my subject, I build credibility with them, then periodically I drive them to my site when I have a new blog posting. This sounded perfect.
I read that I need to be a little personal, not over sell and provide some value to the readers. Following the advice I wrote a long list of useful tweets that I could send periodically and added my own personal ones as I felt like it. I added my twitter account link to my blog and started tweeting, soon enough I started to get 10's people following me and this just kept growing. I also went searching on twitter for people in similar fields and followed them as well as retweeting other peoples comments.
I noticed that most tweeters fell into three camps
1. Lifestyle Tweeters - ie the people who tell you what they are doing and what they find interesting. Most of the celebs tweet this way.
2. Filter Tweeters - ie people who have an interest on a specific topic and when they learn anything / find a website / new press release they tweet it. There are lots of people who do this on technology subjects.
3. Broadcast Tweeters - ie people who broadcast links to their site, not in a spamming way, but almost using twitter like and announcement system.
After a lot of effort and sending out 8 tweets per day for around 6 weeks and following all the expert advice I had paid for I could count the clicked links back to my blog on one hand.
Maybe I was too old at 35 for this social networking stuff, I went in search of some answers.
Amongst my followers I looked for what appears to be the most successful business tweeters, I then started by analysing their tweets. The majority fitted into my "3. Broadcast" category with some doing a combination of both lifestyle tweeting and broadcast tweeting.
I then started to look through each of their followers one by one finding out who they were. They pretty much all fell into these categories:
- Journalists / bloggers looking for content to write about
- People trying to sell you stuff online
- So-called Internet marketing experts selling their services
- Coaches of varying types
- People trying to promote affiliate or get rich quick products / services
- Kids or younger people using it to communicate with each other
- Short term users probably interested in the novelty factor of hearing from celebrity bloggers who don't tweet for long
Whilst I am sure I still have loads to learn about twitter and how to use it for business I posed the question to myself, "If everyone is shouting, who is actually listening?", and moreover, "are any of my potential customers listening?"
I could have the most compelling tweets in the world but if my prospects aren't there or are not listening I am wasting my time.
I think if you are selling to any one of the outlined categories above then twitter is a great marketing tool. I think added to this if you sell to one-man-band businesses where the owner is both making the purchasing decisions and doing marketing then twitter also works well.
I've also found it an effective tool at contacting people and finding other like minded businesses that I could perhaps partner with.
If you question the power of social media these days you can expect to get burned at the stake, so I await the condemnation. But I'm starting to reach an inescapable conclusion about using twitter as a b 2 b marketing tool.
With some small exceptions, almost everyone using twitter for business purposes is doing so to market their business. If their business is bigger then perhaps 3-4 people then its likely that the marketing is done a different person to whom would buy your product or service (unless you sell a marketing product). Whilst many of these companies could provide you a good marketing partnership opportunity if you hope to drive product interest via twitter, the truth is that nobody is listening.
This style of micro broadcasting is undoubtedly part of the future for b to b marketing, but for it to work there must be many more "listeners" than there is now and those listening should include everyone in all aspects of a business and not just those wearing a marketing hat. Take an owner of a 30 person business, will he/she sit at his/her desk with tweetdeck open following 1500 people all sending 5 tweets per day? I think not, I'm sure he/her has more to do. For this type of micro broadcasting to work effectively the technology must evolve a little further.
I still tweet away offering gems of business advice and hoping to build partnerships, but I don't expect too much from it anymore. Follow me at http://www.twitter.com/johnathanbriggs