Forum Moderators: rogerd
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:
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.
The most worrying facts were 16 hours spent for $0 income and $0 worth of information.
16 hours? Vince, Vince, Vince (shakes head). That in itself makes the review biased.
WebmasterWorld is high on information value per hour, other places are high leads per hour.
And did you make money in the first 16 hours after joining WebmasterWorld?
Noise to signal ratio (just today): 80% commercial spam, 15% inane irrelevant messages, 5% signal but mostly old news.
Ah, you're Following the wrong people. It takes a while to fine tune the list of those you Follow. You have some control over the signal to noise ratio, quite a bit if you know how to work the system.
My conclusion is that twitter is a total irrelevance for business use.
Many have come to that same conclusion. And then you have the flip side of the coin where many find it 100% relevant for business use.
Tell me, what exactly were you expecting in one week or 16 hours? You've missed the BIG picture. Vince, Vince, Vince (shakes head). Did you delete your Twitter account?
Personal interaction: six isolated replies to @replys against 3x that number sent
I think I was a couple of those. Truth is, I was talking to you as soon as you joined simply because I recognized you from WebmasterWorld. If I hadn't recognized the username, I would have spent a few weeks listening to what you were posting before I decided whether or not to start talking to you.
Also, I think you changed your username at least once during that week... If I didn't know you from WebmasterWorld, that would have been a big red flag to me.
I had little confidence in the value of something so limited
There may be some confirmation bias at play here?
I manage about a dozen twitter accounts for different sites and the ones I "know won't work on twitter" I don't spend as much time on and have never amounted to much.The ones I "know are perfect for twitter" I check a few times each day, and I can point to specific sales that were influenced by Twitter.
Was it Twitter who determined which accounts were successful? Or was it my attitude about how successful each could be?
P.S. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
I find it interesting that out of the 30 posts on here only 6 have their twitter ID in their WebmasterWorld profile. One person has theirs protected.
I don't have my twitter profile listed because I didn't know I could. WebmasterWorld has always been so strict about links and search terms that I didn't think WebmasterWorld would allow it.
I still won't link my twitter account because it's more of a personal than a webmastering/SEO account. I suppose I could create a sock puppet account for SEO/webmastering purposed but to be honest SEO bores me lately. I'd rather spend the time writing content for my sites that making 1000's of tweets.
I think it's already there...
A good signal that something has gone mainstream is when my mother signs on. I remember when she joined facebook, it was shortly after the FB developer platform was introduced, and FB was already well rooted in the international zeitgeist. She's not on Twitter yet, but some of her friends are, and she's mentioned Twitter in conversation recently so I know the day isn't far off when I'll get a follower notification from Mum.
You'll also know "it's arrived" when you start seeing mobile devices with Twitter clients built-in and preinstalled. I predict that day will be coming really soon.
For the most part I use twitter to get updates for deals and specials from companies.
I have even been thanked for pointing out information to a potential customer who purchased and thanked me very much for the info. I find it's an excellent way to maintain close contact with customers and offer them help.
For those wondering how I do this. Choose a good nick, preferably the main keyword phrase. Use twitter search and engage potential customers asking or commenting about that service or product.
Now I have the main keywords for all my main products, my merchant has been effectively locked out and I have the jump on them communicating closer to their customer base than they potentially can.
It took me over a year to figure out how to make money from twitter, however in talking to others and interacting I have gained many new friendships and business deals that I'd never have otherwise. I also was the first to register the 1st local 'tub twitter underground brigade group and it have over 900 real members with regular tweetups of 75-100 people which is cool.
Think about it: you are specifically targeting messages (that link to your forum/blog) to people who inherently love to post online. What a great way to foster an active online community.
For other purposes, Twitter may or may not be useful. It is always funny to see businesses awkwardly try to utilize Twitter in order to jump on the bandwagon with no idea what their actual goals are...
Links
I rarely discuss links, it is Bad Karma. So, I'll make it short and sweet. You could really jumpstart a new campaign, website launch, etc. using the various Social Media outlets. I've picked up more links using Twitter than any other resource to date. And, from a much broader spectrum of websites due to the global nature of Twitter.
Do not know how they twitter site and if links or not but suspect links included in twitters so agree with Pageone could well be good for building traffic
Favorites
Email
Facebook
Google Bookmarks
Digg
MySpace
Twitter
Delicious
MSN Live
All Others
StumbleUpon
Yahoo Bookmarks
Blogger
steve
Today a lot of people on twitter were announcing that Network Solutions had lost customer data and a representative from Netsol was sending out tweets to each one of those people doing damage control. They were staying on top of their brand and were able to immediately start damage control.
Question from a newbie/non-user:
If I had a Twitter account prior to yesterday, would I be getting this damage control information simply because I had a Twitter account or would I have needed to be one of those people who were spreading the word or have previously signed up to follow NetSol's messages?
I'm thinking of the time/opportunity cost angle. How many people were receiving that information from NetSol and was that the best use of their time by the NetSol employees?
FarmBoy
funny thing is it seems like the non tech world is embracing it more than the tech world.
Kinda like 1999 when the non tech world loaded up on dot com stocks at prices none of us could understand.
If I had a Twitter account prior to yesterday, would I be getting this damage control information simply because I had a Twitter account or would I have needed to be one of those people who were spreading the word or have previously signed up to follow NetSol's messages?
I think there is a market on Twitter. Gain followers. Many of you pros update your sites frequently. That's part of keeping your site visitable, ¿qué no? Put a link on your site, saying, Follow me on Twitter. Then, on Twitter, post updates parallel to your site updates.
Commercial enterprise example? @PCMag, plus each of its writers, have considerable followings. Click through to their articles or product recommendations. Possible money for someone, ¿qué no?
Another fellow many of you may know, not a strictly "conversational" poster: @zeldman (Jeffrey Zeldman) with profile links to his web styling advice pages. Useful to *me*, anyway.
Useful and interesting "non-conversational" followings include such things as @evernote (notebook utility for PC/Mac/iPhone), Sourceforge, and on, and on... Use Twitter Search as many of us do, to find things to follow.
Again, the market is there. Yes, it's not *all* commercial. Nor are all websites. Nor all blogs. It does not follow, though, that market effort=no gain.
I think there is a market on Twitter. Gain followers...Put a link on your site, saying, Follow me on Twitter.
Fair enough.
On almost all of my sites, instead of "Follow me on Twitter" I have for years had "Subscribe" links where people subscribe to an email newsletter. I have software that handles the subscription process and allows me to sort & send messages of almost unlimited length including whatever links I want.
In what ways is Twitter superior to that? I'm not debating, I'm asking, I'm basically ignorant about the ways of Twitter.
(Side note: I have visted Twitter 3 times in the last 24 hours to look around and each time my computer locked up upon the Twitter home page loading)
FarmBoy
Most recently, I found a group of website designers. I chose various members to whom I listen for advice.
On the web, at times, browsing commercial products in which I'm interested (especially tech products) I'll see "follow me" links, using which I can keep up on their latest developments, new product announcements, firmware/software updates/versions, (even for sale at moderate cost), etc.
As for browser load difficulties, I've had no such problem with four browsers on Windows or MacOSX!
Let's add a new element to the equation.Links
I rarely discuss links, it is Bad Karma. So, I'll make it short and sweet. You could really jumpstart a new campaign, website launch, etc. using the various Social Media outlets. I've picked up more links using Twitter than any other resource to date. And, from a much broader spectrum of websites due to the global nature of Twitter.
same. thank you permatweet links ;)
