Have you ever wondered if there was a marketing advantage to being on Twitter? Many people, or even companies, setup a Twitter account and then do very little with it, but are they missing out through this activity?
In this article we're going to look at some of the pro's and con's of Twitter, and whether you should be spending so much of your time in trying to drum up sales using it.
Let's start by telling you what Twitter is. Essentially it's a way that people can keep in contact using a form of 'micro blogging'. They are not necessarily communicating one-to-one with anyone in many of their tweets, but it is possible to do (in a way) by using the 'at sign' (@) in front of the person's user ID which will let Them know that someone is talking about them.
A far simpler method is to send them a private message, but then they may as well have just sent an email.
What are the pro's of using Twitter?
The first thing is the fact that you can build up quite a large following of people. If you were to go out and use the standard internet marketing methods for getting people on a list it would either cost you a small fortune in clicks using PPC (pay per click), or, it would take you several months of writing good quality articles And then giving people a reason to sign up to hear from you.
That's a very time or money intensive way to go about getting a list of people.
The next pro is that you're restricted to 140 characters in your messages. No need for the long and ponderous prose when you have the length of a decent paragraph to get your point across. This saves you time, and makes sure you get straight to the point.
You can tweet as often as you like. Just imagine if you were sending emails out to people about your latest product, just how high on a scale of one to one hundred do you think that they'd get annoyed if you emailed them ten to twenty times a day? That's right, probably three hundred and twenty seven.
With Twitter you can tweet as often as you like without too many people getting too annoyed about it.
One of the last of many points to mention is the potential for instant customer feedback. If someone buys your product, and has an opinion on it, the chances are you hear about it pretty quickly on Twitter. This is also a very good way to interact with them and see what you can do to make the situation better, if there's a problem, or just say thanks if they have a good word for your product.
What are some of the cons about using Twitter?
First off you have to try to put together a group of followers who are interested in your niche. That's not always difficult, but you may have to spend some time filtering out the people who've only joined your list as a way of growing their.
The next con is the fact that they only have a 140 character limit. While this is a pro, it's also just as easily a con too. Not everyone can be concise, so the chances are you're not going to be able to say everything you need to in order to get those potential buyers. It's an art form, but for many it may as well be cubism.
Many of the people on Twitter take an instant dislike to people trying to sell things to them. This is a reasonable thing to understand as many of them are just on there to write short and often meaningless messages, either to their friends, or nobody in particular, so being sold to put a damper on that.
There is so much spam starting to appear. The spam is not always in the messages that they send but can just be down to the sheer number of times that they send messages in the space of a few minutes.
This is often down to the fact that they're using some form of automation to send them, but still, looking at your screen and seeing that it is three quarters full of messages from one person is not going to make you want to buy from Them – and it's only a button away to delete them from your list permanently.
Do you know how long your tweet stays in front of people? It's really down to the list of followers that they have, and how active those followers are, but in the early days your tweet would have been on there screens for around two minutes. That meant that you either had to keep resending it as often as possible, or just hope that as many of them as possible were watching in those two minutes.
There we have it; Some of the pros and cons of Twitter when it comes to marketing.
You can get messages out to your followers quickly, but the chances are they may never see them. It's free to build your list of followers, but other people may be joining as a way to builder there's and they may be spammers. Finally, the number of characters you're restricted to can help you deliver a more targeted message, but having to cut it down too much can have an adverse effect on what you're trying to do.
Despite the cons there's no reason not to have a go at trying to market using Twitter.
