subject: Is Twitter Really An Effective Marketing Tool For Your Business? [print this page] Is Twitter Really An Effective Marketing Tool For Your Business?
Since its creation and launch in 2006, Twitter has rapidly risen to be known to millions of people around the world, with an estimated 175 million users broadcasting hundreds of thousands of tweets every day. From celebrities to multi million pound businesses, everyone seems to want a piece of Twitter and for some it has proved to be a very effective communication tool.
It is true to say that Twitter has been adopted by the users of the Internet with wide and welcoming arms, with everyone wanting to tweet about their daily lives and try to communicate with each other in less characters than a text message. Millions of businesses and companies are also now using Twitter to broadcast messages to their followers, tweeting a quick message with a link for the user to find out more.
One of the limitations of Twitter is the amount of information that you can broadcast to your followers, with messages no longer than 140 characters currently allowed on the system or as a tweet. This means that if you have a really good message to get across to your followers than you literally have a sentence to try and tell them what you need to, with even the most genius of marketers struggling to effectively communicate a special offer in such a short method.
Even if you were able to shorten any message by a few words, trying to get across to your followers a special offer, event, company update or any other kind of message in just this short amount of space is almost impossible, especially if you want the user to be intrigued by your message and then click on the link to find out more or contact you with a message.
One of the other problems we see with using Twitter to communicate your messages, offers, special promotions and updates is that every other person that your follower is following will also be doing the same, which means your Tweet could literally just be lost in the volume. A quick glance at our Twitter account yesterday saw that the people we were following in total sent "us" about 800 tweets, and we only follow about 400 people, so imagine if your followers are following thousands.
Imagine driving down the Motorway and you see one big sign advertising a business every 100 miles of your journey. The chances of you remembering that one sign are really quite high. Now imagine the same journey but with 100 signs, one every mile, the chances of your remembering even 2 of these signs will be limited because you have simply been overloaded with information and at times, Twitter suffers the same fate unless you really limit the people that you follow.
Twitter can be a really amazing marketing tool for some businesses, as long as you really keep an eye on the messages that you are broadcasting and the kind of people that follow you.
You have to make your message or tweet stand out from the thousands of others that are flooding through your followers Twitter account every day and this is where the challenge really sits. Businesses have done very well from Twitter but it is true to say that it does not work for everyone, but as long as you don't spend every waking minute working on Twitter then having an account can be worthwhile and rewarding, if you get it right.
