Moving away from the tech crowed, Twitter has become THE buzz word of marketing managers over the last two months – and I mean old skool marketers, who haven’t used any form of social media before…
One of many reasons why Twitter isn’t going to solve your marketing problems is that of the definition of followers… It might sound fantastic that I, some guy from Melbourne, have 920 followers and that I have the power to reach 920 people with any given tweet – right?
If it was an email database, which achieves 20-25% open rate, you’d expect to reach 230 people at most.
If you’re talking about a Facebook page you might get 1-2% interacting with your page after a message, so 10-20 people.
But with Twitter, due to its nature and the speed at which it moves, you’re only going to reach anyone who is on Twitter at the moment that you post the message, which could be from 0.1-0.2%. Which varies massively depending on the day of the week and time of the day. However, 920 followers might result in 5-10 people viewing your Tweet. (This all assumes you’re posting boring content, that those 5-10 people wont ReTweet on to their followers – which is the true power of spreading your message on Twitter)
Now if you’re not focusing on reaching lots of people, then good, great, you understand social media and the importance of building strong connections, however, if you’re looking to reach thousands of people, Twitter aint for you.
On top of that I would estimate that 20-30% of my and everyone’s followers are spammers, they’re people who follow anyone and everyone and don’t really care about you…
There are a few reasons why people might follow you on Twitter, TwiTip thinks there’s 6:
1. Because they’re a follow whore! Meaning they follow anybody in the hopes they will get a follow back.
2. You just might actually have something interesting to say…that’s a big might!
3. You either have Internet fame or you’re some form of celebrity outside of Twitter.com
4. You’re one of the people that Twitter automatically recommends an user adds when they first sign up for Twitter. Basically meaning your one of the “Toms” of Twitter.com
5. You were tagged in the #FollowFridays train. Which in this case you probably have internet fame and just joined Twitter.com or either have something VERY interesting to say or your friends were tired of you stealing all their followers and/or watch your follower count lingering below the double digit count
6. Because you used a Twitter spammer site like twitterfollower.com or the others. If you don’t understand that refer to “Real” reason number 1.
All this means, is that 10,000 people following you on Twitter isn’t the same as 10,000 people on your email database or Facebook group.
UPDATE (20/5)
Jack Dorsey comments on the difference between Facebook & Twitter users here, including this comment from O’Reily
The feature has skyrocketed the popularity of users who get that endorsement — netting an average of 53,000 new followers in an account’s first week since being featured, O’Reilly writes. But it’s not the ideal solution for the user retention problem, Dorsey said.
