Twitter: Is it an Effective Marketing Medium?
Twoverload. I guess that’s the word for being overloaded with tweets on Twitter.
When I first signed up with Twitter, there were a lot fewer users than there are now. At the time, I thought the whole thing was quite pointless and even cancelled my account. I resurrected it several months later though.
As Twitter took off and the online marketers realised they could use it to promote their wares, a number of different schemes to increase your number of followers sprung up. The first one I came across was TweeterGetter, which promised something like 19,000 followers in 1 month. For me, the reality was never like that, but I did get several hundred followers as a result of using it.
The big problem with getting all those followers was that many of them didn’t like the idea that they followed you but you didn’t follow them back. Consequently they would soon “unfollow”.
As a result of the obvious imbalance of Followers to Following, various online services appeared which automatically managed your Twitter account. Whenever you gained a new follower, the service would auto-follow them back again, thus reducing the number of followers who would subsequently unfollow.
And this is where the problem lies.
The number of followers to my Twitter account recently reached about 800. I was auto-following them back, which meant that I was receiving the tweets of 800 different people; many of whom were quite prolific tweeters. Some even had an auto-tweeting service set up that would automatically send pre-programmed tweets at regular intervals.
A lot of the incoming tweets were not really of interest to me, or they came in so rapidly that anything that I was genuinely interested in would pass through unseen. It was only by using programs such as TweetDeck that I was able to separate out the tweets of my friends and family.
TweetDeck was acting like a spam filter. I very rarely look in the column containing all the incoming tweets – just my filtered columns.
I have my copy of TweetDeck set up to check my status once per minute, and on average, on each update I receive 18 tweets. That’s equivalent to around one tweet every 3 seconds. No wonder the tweets from my friends were getting lost. That was with just 800 followers. I know people who have 20,000 followers, so their accounts must be absolutely swamped.
It struck me that there must now be thousands of Twitter users who have hundreds or thousands of followers, who also receive the tweets of those hundreds or thousands of people. If the majority of those followers/followed are online marketers, their messages are probably not even being seen.
It’s like standing in the middle of a major sporting event full of cheering fans, and then trying to advertise your product to them by speaking at a normal level. Perhaps a few people standing nearby might hear you, but nobody else will. Those people standing nearby are equivalent to Twitter users who follow just a handful of people.
Twitter was never meant to be an advertising medium, and it never really can be. As soon as you let all those advertisers into your personal twitterverse, you’re overloading yourself and you start to ignore everything that comes in. The advertising message gets lost in the tide of unwanted tweets.
But I guess that people will see the false potential of Twitter as an advertising medium for some time to come, or at least until the next big thing comes along.
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