Why Twitter Marketing Doesn’t Work for You

Much has been posted already about Twitter marketing – and now here’s my take on it. Everyone seems to be on Twitter these days, they always talk about how great it is for business, but do you personally succeed with it? Or do you personally know a lot of people who successfully drive traffic and conversions to their sites from Twitter? In other words, does Twitter marketing work?

There is an abundance of tips, articles, or even books written about Twitter. Do they all help? No. Why?

Problem is, very often Twitter marketing becomes a numbers game (which in most cases is a wrong measurement anyway).

Unfortunately most twitter ‘gurus’ teach how to increase the number of followers with no regard to relevancy – while this may work if you’re offering the products or services of most general interest suitable for almost everyone, it won’t work for anything more specific. How many vendors can insert their products into the following statement: ‘every twitter user needs …’? If you can not then the sheer numbers game is not for you.  Many people who used to make money with AdSense learned this lesson when they switched to affiliate marketing – if you want to convert your traffic make it targeted (same with Digg, and same with twitter – social media is no different).

Chasing the followers reduces relevancy – it causes a snowball effect. By chasing the follower numbers, you make yourself susceptible to increasing irrelevancy because other users whose primary goal is chasing the numbers have little regard to relevancy. The more people you follow and the more people follow you, the more noticeable you become – and automatically, you become a target to those irrelevant followers. Think of popular tweeters like Scoble or Chris Pirillo – sure many of their followers follow them because they are genuinely interested in what these users tweet about – but how many just follow them in hopes they would follow them back and hardly ever care about their tweets?