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Twitter has been bandied around as the next best thing in advertising for some time now. Upon its initial bubble, the social networking site was a thing of novelty, and the various tricks that marketers played were not noticed by many users. Becoming followed by a user could be as simple as following their tweets and many users would return the favor, regardless of content.
The website quickly became the darling of new media advertising agencies and the new breed of social media marketing experts. There is no doubt the social media can be a powerful and useful tool to reach out to customers with, but with all technology many took it too far in order for the chance to market their product. Tweets from many companies or individuals can simply be a wall of noise, tweet after tweet of useless information generally promoting their product in some way.
Still, as with email spam marketing, there is still a tiny percentage of people who will follow these badly managed advertising streams of consciousness, so they continue to appear. The simple marketer is caught up in what he perceives as an important battle to get more followers. More followers = more clout and more views, right? So they add hundreds of new users each day, some of whom will follow them back out of a feeling of courtesy or a mistaken idea that the advertising stream may be of some use to them in the future.
One of the many problems with this approach is that it is not well targeted. Sure, the marketer can choose to try and get people to follow his tweets taken from a list of those who follow his competitor. Therefore they should be interested in similar products. But if the Twitter stream is full of low quality content, only the impartial will follow the new company. These are people who will usually follow a simply huge number of Twitter streams, and therefore are unlikely to ever read the information you post on your stream. In reality, they are probably also caught up in the Twitter follower counting.
Much more important is the quality of your followers, so you should not lower your customer bases view of your company by being too aggressive with the marketing of your own Twitter stream. If you offer useful information, then the users will begin to come to you naturally, and the number of legitimate followers will snowball with time.
Claire Jarrett runs Marketing By Web, who offer AdWords Management and SEO Bristol. Follow her on Twitter here!
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Hey there Slappy!
Wow! I think you’ve been hanging around your human-owner a really long time! You’re getting pretty smart about all the social media tips and tricks! You are also so right. Too many people are obsessed with doing nothing more than gaining a bunch of follows.
Let’s keep it social!
General Sarge – Two paws up!
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Not my words General Sarge, this is a Guest Post from MyBlogGuest
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I have some wonderful Twitter followers, but I must admit it is hard to reach out to the ones that matter. Usually the distinguishing characteristic of a Twitter follower that counts is that they’ll network with you elsewhere, if they don’t openly engage your tweets or promote content.
That having been said: I really need a way to reach out to niche audiences on Twitter. Tags and geographic location aren’t enough. It’s amazing how much sorting one has to do to find the audience one wants. Twitter demands a lot of attention.
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It certainly does need a lot of attention, what with the spammers that have a terrible habit of following and then asking you to join Mafia families, WHY!?
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Even after two years I find myself trying to get my numbers up, even though obsessing over your follower count is not good, truth lies in the more expansive your network the greater your reach.
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Nicely put Justin, it seems that having more followers i certainly the way to get a bigger reach out, but sadly not everyone that followers actually reads our tweets
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That is certainly true, and this is both in part due to people not actively watching the stream when the tweet goes out as well as people following so many they can’t see 1 tweet among the stream of tweets invading their timeline. This is why it takes broadcasting the same article multiple times per day and week to ensure that others have all seen it. It looks like duplication to some, but for most the 4th tweet or 9th tweet may be the first time they saw you talk about the article.
Justin Germino recently posted..Google I-O Keynote Highlights
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Increasing your followers is always a good thing, only if you get quality followers of course. Participating in the you follow me, I will follow you game isn’t something I tend to do myself. When someone engages me for a bit and has quality content then I will follow the individual.
Auto tweeting is something I like to keep to a minimum as well as I like my stream’s content to be things I am truly interested in.
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If you do follow in the footsteps of those that follow you because you follow them, you will find that you get a mass of followers that just tweet about spammy subjects or worse “adult” stuff!!!
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That spammy stuff is what I am trying to avoid!
Bodynsoil recently posted..Eleven Laws of Fitness- Tony Horton talks about your results with P90X
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I agree with you. There are tons of people who’s sole purpose in Twitter world is to get more followers than the next guy. I do some marketing of my products, mainly through my blog posts, but I also engage my followers and those I follow, I also try to tweet non business related info at least as much as business stuff. I really like the fact that you can do both on Twitter and let your personality flow a little.
Hey there Slappy, time to drop a comment.
I’ve been quite busy lately with my projects, so didn’t manage to get time to my favorite bear.
I’ve never been to twitter following, so really don’t know how you’re supposed to get twitter followers. I just opened up my twitter account.
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