Monday, September 28, 2009

To Tweet Or Not To Tweet

To Tweet or not to Tweet. That is the question put to us on a regular basis by our business owner clients. Should Twitter be a part of their marketing strategy, they ask. Like everything in life there isn't a yes or no answer! The place to start is your target market. Where and who is your ideal client? According to a recent Toronto Star article the Solutions Research Group has identified the Canadian Twitter demographics to be:
  • 42% are aged 18 to 34
  • 28% are 35 to 49
  • 17% are 50 and older
  • 13% are 12 to 17
So if your target market is consumers in the 12 to 17 age group then you may think twice. Not to say some businesses are not using Twitter well by announcing upcoming events or the introduction of new products. The Toronto Star article (September 26th Business Section) cites evidence that Twitter does have a growing following of businesses. And it quotes Keith Macarthur, Roger's head of social media, who can see Twitter becoming a great tool for their customer relations.

The problem as I see it is that the business Tweets are crowded out by the hundreds of innocuous messages like "I have just eaten the best ham sandwich ever" or "On the way to work I saw the coolest shoes". Furthermore we have to wait for the qualified "followers" to find us and want to follow us. I always prefer more proactive marketing strategies myself. As Adrian Davis, President of Whetstone, wrote in a recent blog "these (social media) are focused on quantity of connections rather than quality".

We have a model we use when working with our clients: "While you are doing one thing, you can't be doing another thing." This is particularly true for small business owners who do not have armies of people to delegate work to. So if you are focused on getting Twitter up and running as an effective marketing tool you are not doing some other maybe proven marketing activity. Not to say you shouldn't try but keep in mind that Twitter is yet to prove itself as an effective marketing tool.

Social media is here to stay. And it's fun. But is Twitter the right marketing tool for business? Is Twitter worth the investment of our scarce resources - time and money? Will Twitter enhance the very core of quality marketing - relationship building? I don't think so. But it is time for some serious debate on the benefits of the social media for businesses. To start the debate I bring your attention to two excellent articles on the subject.

This one was written by David Baker, founder of ReCourses - David's article
And this comes from Adrian Davis, President of Whetstone Inc - Adrian's article

So think about it. Will Twitter and all the other social media become the future marketing miracles for us business owners or will they fade into the sunset. No, they are not going to fade away! I'm just not sure what form they will take. And I'm not sure if they will become an integral part of our marketing tool box.

Join the debate. Leave a comment or email me at nick@yourplanningpartners.com.
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4 comments:

  1. Debra Gould, The Staging DivaOctober 1, 2009 at 5:52 PM

    I think you've missed a key point in all of this because you're so focussed on who will read your tweets and whether there are enough people of the right age in your target market to do so.

    Twitter posts, or "tweets" are indexed by Google and they are a key way to get links back to your sites and blogs.

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  2. Kent Wakely, Fruition InteractiveOctober 2, 2009 at 1:07 PM

    There are strategies for reducing the time that tweeting can potentially rob from your other marketing efforts. Most of our tweets, for instance, are of content that's being re-purposed from our newslettter or from our email blasts or from other marketing/service communications we do.

    Twitter itself consumes very little of our marketing budget (time and/or money) and it's helped us reach potential customers and employees that we couldn't have reached any other way.

    And then there's the Google Juice benefit that Debra mentions.... Twitter is a good thing from a Search Engine Optimization point of view.

    - kent

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  3. Trina LambeOctober 6, 2009 at 6:41 PM

    Thanks for the Blog on this topic Nick, I think like any technology it will just be imporved on and as you said twitter/social media is not going anywhere but even more main stream. As a business owner my thought is to jump on the social media craze and at least stay with the trend.

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  4. Beth ParkerOctober 7, 2009 at 7:20 PM

    The real question is whether your tweets are about you or about your customers. Otherwise Tweets risk the fate of so many inexpensive marketing tools. They just become a way for me to give my opinion (and who cares!) Except for this particular opinion, of course.

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