I should be using that Twitter thing for marketing

Should you?

Before jumping on the bandwagon, try to figure out if the bandwagon can get you where you are going (or trying to get to). According to one of more recent researches, ‘the top 10% of prolific Twitter users accounted for over 90% of tweets’. Does that mean Twitter is fast becoming a one-way communication tool?

Well, yes and no. Again, just like with SEO, it’s all about content and relevancy. If you are putting out tweet after tweet but aren’t really seeing any increases in conversions or even significant traffic spikes on your website, you might as well lay it off and not waste your time anymore, as tweeting for the sake of it (or because ‘everyone is doing that, so it must be good’) isn’t going to help much.

However, some companies have managed to chalk up sales from Twitter. Dell, for example, has been posting to Twitter regularly for two years and managed to rack in $3 million in sales just from the tweets alone. However, their strategy includes Twitter-only deals (about half of their posts), and each includes a coupon and a link to the deal. What also helps Dell is their massive army of more than 600000 followers – many of whom re-tweet the deals themselves.

So, before you start heavily investing your time into Twitter in the hope of generating sales, ask yourself:

- Do you have  a special offer to your followers?
- Do you include a link into your post (with a possible Twitter-only traffic content on the page)
- Do you have any of your current customers amongst your followers? If you do, they are more likely to re-tweet  you themselves
- Is the offer relevant to your followers?
- Have you promoted your Twitter account as an ‘exclusive deals’ outlet both on your websites and email?

Whatever you do, remember that while Twitter response is more immediate than one of email or direct mail, its spike does tend to fade away a lot faster, so be prepared to deal with the spike straight away.