Should you focus on twitter as a marketing medium for your website or not?
That seems to be the big question these days, with its ever growing popularity and the way it’s consistently in the global media. My opinion is that it’s really up to you – but if you can totally automate it - then why not.
What I can tell you is that the majority of traffic to our websites comes from the following sources in order of volume (with the top 3 often changing places quite often)…
- Organic Search Engine Rankings
- Paid Advertising (PPC and Other)
- Email Marketing (via Newsletter Publishing)
- Affiliates Promoting Our Products
- Strategic Linking
- Other (including twitter)
…so twitter, to us anyway, is pretty low on the priority scale.
Right now it doesn’t make sense for someone on this end to spend 30 minutes per day tweeting about what I had for breakfast (who cares anyway right), or trying to get my point or opinion across in 120 characters or less.
Of course, that’s not to say we ignore twitter.
You can find my personal twitter account here.
One thing that’s going to be immediately apparent when you take a look is that you’re not going to find out what I had for breakfast. Sorry about that. In fact the only thing this account is doing at the moment is receiving “auto tweets” about the posts I make to our primary WordPress blog (this blog).
Anytime we update the blog, a tweet is auto generated and linked back to the specific post on the blog.
This is the WordPress plugin that does the job.
NB: There are others out there also but this was the better one in my opinion.
There is no additional work once you have the plugin setup (and the settings defined to your personal preferences). You simply make a post to your blog and your twitter account gets updated.
That’s why I called this post “Lazy Twitter Marketing”.
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4 Responses to Lazy Twitter Marketing
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Hello Duncan,
First time commenter, long-time lurker. I really enjoy your articles.
I agree with the title of your post. But there is a danger associated with being a lazy Twitterer. Yes, the automated tool is great. I use a similar one. But what it amounts to is talking at people instead of starting a conversation with them.
Some people will follow it, but with the amount of noise generated with Twitter, chances are the occasional tweet will simply get lost in the mire. Furthermore, you are missing out on developing the kinds of relationships that could foster a greater level of viral marketing by requesting retweets and starting discussions with your followers.
Lastly, if you are not managing your account, and watching your new followers and following them back, chances are you are building a long list of robotic followers that have no reaction to your posts.
So, I don’t know that simply creating a Twitter account and then automating posts really has any value at all.
Yes, I agree with JuiceeLinks. There’s way too much hype around Twitter, and as I see it, to be able to use it properly you’ve got to focus on just following a few key people. And then you might start having a conversation – but not if its an automatically generated one!
I agree with some of your article, but I disagree on the ranking of traffic sources. Each site has different referral profiles, and a lot of time strategic partners and social media outlets can draw substantial traffic. Twitter should also not be automated, but rather used when some relevant content or idea pops up.
@Zack Gideon
“I disagree on the ranking of traffic sources”
I think I would know the ranking of traffic sources for our own sites – but I see what you’re getting at. Of course twitter could prove to be a valuable traffic source for some – but that was not the idea behind this post. It was written to give those who would like to “be there” an option without having to focus on it. There’s nothing to loose by auto posting to your twitter account – in fact you’ve only got new links and search engine spider activity to gain.
Of course if you want to really FOCUS on twitter, then it’s a different story. However, in terms of a reliable and steady stream of visitors to a website, there are much more effective website marketing techniques – and the funny thing is they haven’t really changed for the past 10 years.