Twitter is Junk
Why do I think this? When ever I see Twitter I see a stream of noise. There maybe some signal in there but there is so much noise it makes it useless for business. I have looked in to this extensively and decided its junk. Here are some interesting articles on the subject that I have used to come to my conclusion.
From Aaron Wall’s Private forum. You need to register ($300 a month) to get the full discussion but here’s his case study in full.
“Twitter is Garbage – More Proof
If you got in early (and used a robot to sign up 10,000′s of followers) and are getting brand advertisers to overpay to get something they don’t understand the value of, then Twitter rocks. same is true if your name is paris hilton or that kardishian or whatever…
Or if you are that guy from shitmydadsays then maybe that is good too.
BUT for most people Twitter is a waste of time (at least from a business perspective). And I have a perfect case study to prove it
so for a while someone else squatted on the Twitter username for SEOBook. we got it back say 5 or 6 months ago or something (by me faking like I was a lawyer…well a friend did that first and then I carried it forward).
so our Twitter username has about 1,200 followers and is in ~ 100 lists.
well when I changed our price-point to the new price (so I wouldn’t be constantly burned out by having too much demand…which was the case at the old price) I also had to make pages for the old price point for our customers who had their credit cards get stolen, had paypal cancel their account somehow, accidentally let a credit card expire, etc etc etc.
well anyhow…I forgot that our site automatically tweets new blog posts and pages here over on Twitter…and so those links at the lower rates (for members who had issues with paypal and such) were actually accessible to our 1,200 Twitter users for a week (until I noticed it when someone recently joined at the lower rate)…at which point in time I traced what happened and changed the URLs and deleted the Tweets.
but here we are…
1.) with a well known brand
2.) which has been closed to consumers for months
3.) accidentally sharing a link for 50% or 67% off
4.) to our over 1,000 twitter subscribers
5.) and it took a week for 1 conversion to happen.
now imagine trying to use Twitter as your marketing strategy with limited capital, few followers, no discount (accidental or otherwise), and no brand…simply a waste of time for small businesses and such.
whenever I hear real-time search I immediately think of 6 things…
1.) spam
2.) irrelevance
3.) hyperbole
4.) black and white reductionistic garbage
5.) public relations spin
6.) freetards ”
So who is this Aaron Wall? If you didn’t know he’s the number 1 internet marketer of 2009 according to investp.net. If you are serious about SEO, his training scheme is a must.
From Leo Laporte’s Blog Buzz Kill
Basically, he signed up to Google Buzz. He used a service which automatically turned his buzzes in to tweets. For two weeks nothing went out on Twitter. Here’s his lesson.
“But I am also taking away a hugely important lesson.
No one noticed.
Not even me.
It makes me feel like everything I’ve posted over the past four years on Twitter, Jaiku, Friendfeed, Plurk, Pownce, and, yes, Google Buzz, has been an immense waste of time. I was shouting into a vast echo chamber where no one could hear me because they were too busy shouting themselves. All this time I’ve been pumping content into the void like some chatterbox Onan. How humiliating. How demoralizing.”
So who is Leo Laporte? Well, he’s the Tech Guy on some American Radio Stations. He had over 200 000 followers on Twitter. He gets the waste of time Twitter is now.
From Marketing Week Social Media is for people not Brands.
Mark Ritson asks some interesting questions about Twitter and how much is real and how much is hype. Looking at the numbers he dispels some myths.
“Did you know, for example, that five brands, including big players like Morrisons and Barclays, don’t use Twitter at all? How do we reconcile that with the apparently essential nature of social media for 2010 marketing strategies?
”
…
“And many of the brands that do use Twitter are having very little impact. Forget the hype for a second and just look at the numbers. Of the 15 brands in the top 20 that tweet, several of them – including BP, Vodafone and BT – have fewer followers than tweets. Have you ever encountered a successful mass-communications strategy that involves more messages than audience members? In the particular case of BT and Vodafone, it also prompts the question, given the business they are in and the fact that both have more tweets than followers, why they didn’t just pick up the phone and call their customers instead?”
…
“The problem with the social media crowd is that they are way too positive and biased towards its potential for every brand, in every situation. Of course they would be positive because it’s not their money they are spending, it’s yours. ”
Who is Mark Riston? From his website, Mark Ritson is an Associate Professor of Marketing and an Expert on Branding,
Voted Best Teacher on the MBA programs at LBS, MBS & MIT Sloan, Published in Journal of Consumer Research, Sloan Management Review & HBR, Weekly Columnist in Marketing Week, PPA Columnist of the Year in 2009. Consultant to some of the World’s Greatest Brands.
From Searchengineland, another study that shows the junk value of twitter.
Basically, the author had the great idea of tagging his links with Google Analytics tags so he could segment the traffic. (He’s a conversion rate expert and doesn’t tag every link by default!!). In 3 months he managed to get 5 email signups to a free newsletter.
“In general, 1.7 million impressions resulting in five conversions has left us realizing that we don’t have a social graph large enough to support the focused level of investment in social media right now. I suspect we haven’t generated the trust level to get noticed in the stream as well.”
I have another conclusion which is much simpler (remember Occam’s Razor), Twitter is junk. He’s only got 2000 or so followers. How many followers do you need to have a large enough social graph for Twitter to be worthwhile? This Dilbert strip sums up my feelings towards twitter. Just replace the word “strategizing” with “Twittering” and the jokes the same.
I have heard some counter arguments. The main one is Dell generating $6.5 million in sales from Twitter. This is from the Dell Outlet on Twitter which sells discounted PCs that have been returned for whatever reason. Anyone knows anything about the PC Industry knows that to Dell $6.5 million dollars in sales is a drop in the ocean. With razor thin margins in the PC industry I’d be surprised if they made a profit from it. The main benefit for them is to be associated with Twitter because its trendy. The exposure gained from all the stories about Dell using Twitter was probably more valuable than the sales.
Please leave a comment below if you disagree with me or you can email me ben@Quadd .co.uk I’d love to hear about anyone that is using Twitter to generate a real measurable ROI. IMHO, its SEO, PPC and email marketing where the money is.
