I read alot of posts about growing numbers of followers but I'm only interested in making sales so I'd be really interested to hear from anyone who can quantify the sales they have made as a direct result of growing their Twitter following. Don't get me wrong, I can appreciate the power of Twitter, even if I don't use it at the moment, but I am reluctant to spend time and effort on this subject to the detriment of my other marketing activities. Is it better to use Twitter to keep in touch with your existing customers and contact lists rather than as a pure sales generation tool? What are your thoughts? Is it worth having a go? Steve.
Like any other marketing tool, Twitter is exactly what you make of it. It takes time and focus to make anything work. It's like any other social networking platform. I hear tons of people saying that myspace is dead, over saturated, blah, blah...I'm still making good money from it, but I also have strategys and time put into it. If you are new, you won't make 1 gazillion dollars in 24h...no matter what the copywriting pages say Hope this helps.
Twitters noise ratio is growing at a rapid rate. Their search function is good, that allows you to filter and make it useful.
One of my sites get's a fair bit of twitter traffic, but a lot of time and effort goes into that account. It's also an account that I share with genuine friends and colleagues and I don't spam it at all . . . so I guess the sales come from my rep in my social group - not actually twitter itself. I get so many spam followers it's untrue . . . you must have to do that on an ENORMOUS scale to make it profitable.
twitter is god. I get a lot of traffic from it. i have also read that they plan on having 1 billion users by 2013. It is huge. it is the best place to market. if used wisely it can make you real hard cash.
One of the things I'm trying to figure out is whether the traffic people get actually converts to orders. Do you have a way of measuring this? Traffic and visitors is one thing but targetted, responsive, converting traffic is something else entirely. Steve.
Quite alot of the stuff we do as IMs is repetitive and boring but it becomes less boring when you start to see orders as a direct result. This is what I'm wondering - do people see orders and $$$ as a direct result from their efforts on Twitter? Steve.
all twitter does is increase your online presence. it doesnt really different from facebook groups, blogs or indeed your own website. it's not some wonder tool that will make your sales quadruple over night, it requires the same attention as any other marketing material - time and effort. therefore, it can be used for good, but it can too easily be abused and used for bad.
This is the impression I'm getting from alot of forum posts on this subject. The jury's still out, I think. I just want to make sure I use my time wisely. Steve.
I use Twitter, but I wonder about the people that have rapidly built thousands of followers. Who has the time to deal with that many Tweets? Perhaps it is just the ratio of numbers since it is difficult to measure, i.e. the more followers the more of a percentage of readers (and perhaps clickers) you will have. As for following thousands of people, I don't see how that can be beneficial other than the reciprocal factor of being followed. I do believe that using some of the Twitter tools that are out there such as TweetLater (soon changing to SocialOoph) does help tremendously with organizing and filtering all of those tweets.
yeah another trick is not to just tweet your self-promoting links all the time, but mix it up a bit. Let people know what other non-internet marketing/business stuff you're doing.
Right - 'follow others that are in your niche' is important. You don't want to follow anyone and everyone. What's the point in following people into dog training if your niche that you are promoting is weddings. Often people get the idea that they have to follow back everyone that follows them (I use to do it too), and that just isn't the case. I started using Twitter a couple of years ago before it got real popular and have had to weed it down a lot, in fact several times. So now I keep it at only those that are relevant to what I am doing online.
Is is if you know how to use it the right way. People out here really make hundreds a day using twitter.