by Tomas Tilver

Created on: July 05, 2009

I have been using twitter for a little more than one week now. It is an amazing site, just imagine the number of persons actually using it. The amount of tweets is huge! So for on-line marketing it must be a golden opportunity, lots of prospects to read your tweets. Twitter is a free site, so everyone can join! Perfect for marketing your on-line business... Or?

Twitter is an amazing tool to market your online business, whether products or services. Imagine having 2000 or 5000 or even 10000 followers, eagerly waiting to read your marketing tweets! An amazing opportunity! Yes indeed, but there are some important things to consider.

How about the quality of your followers, the leads you intend to attract as customers? Are they really interested in you and your product/service? Or are they just "random listeners". I would suggest that for all practical reasons you have no clue! When striving to attract thousands of followers you probably do not allocate much effort to each individual follower, it is rather a matter of "using the big trawl". Quantity wins over quality. So most of your followers are probably nowhere near the "raving fans" you would want them to be.

Another thing to consider is that several of your followers are probably on twitter mainly to market their own on-line business. In fact they may well be marketing a competing product or even exactly the same product as yourself.

A third issue is the sheer number of tweets. The average follower, following a couple of hundreds of people, will face a constant stream of incoming tweets. After one to two minutes a tweet has scrolled down below the first page of tweets presented by twitter. And for all practical purposes only the top five to ten tweets are of interest, so the commercial life-length of a tweet is very short.

A fourth issue is the limited length of a tweet, 140 characters maximum. This only allows for a short message and limited possibilities for a meaningful yet unique tweet. Normally you include a link, and the goal of the tweet is to attract as many followers as possible to click the link, go to your website and eventually purchase, register or whatever your offer may be.

A fifth issue is the presence of an audience. Followers do not spend their entire day staring at the screen, waiting for your particular tweet to appear. An average follower would typically watch the screen now and then, a few minutes at a time.

To conclude, twitter is a powerful way to market your on-line business to a large number of people, but with limited knowledge how many listeners you actually have, and their true interest in you and your on-line business. I have made some experiments to measure the actual effects of twittering and will come back in another article with the results.

Keep twittering to market your online business, and Good Luck!

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