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- WebmasterWorld
-- Community Building and User Generated Content
---- A week on twitter

vincevincevince - 8:33 am on Jul 22, 2009 (gmt 0)


Twitter has been talked about a lot here recently, so I thought I'd try it out. To be honest I had little confidence in the value of something so limited; however I created the account, participated, found people I know and people I know of to follow.

I put in a few hours most days for more than a week, and built up around 360 followers. So far so good. I put out around 200 messages.

Today I looked back over the experiment to evaluate the results. They are as follows:

  • New business gained: none ($0)
  • Useful or interesting information found: none
  • New contacts made: none
  • General tweets published: 150+
  • General tweets read: only one was ever replied to
  • Time spent: 16 hours + (what's that in billable hours?)
  • Personal interaction: six isolated replies to @replys against 3x that number sent
  • Noise to signal ratio (just today): 80% commercial spam, 15% inane irrelevant messages, 5% signal but mostly old news

    The most worrying facts were 16 hours spent for $0 income and $0 worth of information. That is far below any form of communication I know. Usually there is a trade off between information value and business value, e.g. WebmasterWorld is high on information value per hour, other places are high leads per hour.

    My conclusion is that twitter is a total irrelevance for business use.

    Thread source:: http://www.webmasterworld.com/community_building/3957161.htm
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