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Twitter: Followers, Niches, and Myths

Twitter has certainly emerged as one of the most popular
social networking/blogging platforms of the past few years.
There are various reasons why Twitter has become so wildly
popular. It is a simple concept where brief messages can be
sent to loyal followers. This is why Twitter is so helpful
to small businesses. It can aid in promoting a business in
the most cost effective manner. Really, this is one of the
very best systems for promoting updates, info, and deals to
the followers of the Twitter account.

The one problem here is that most entrepreneurs look towards
quantity as opposed to quality in their followers. This can
prove to be a huge mistake since you never want to sacrifice
quality when looking to amass Twitter followers.

How do people make such a mistake? Well, they look at
volume as being the secret to their success. The problem
here is that the process is not going to be a very
successful one. Rather, it can prove to be disastrous more
than anything else because your business ends up promoting
itself to those that are really not interested in the
products or services you are offering.

Yes, some people will sign on to be followers of your
Twitter account with no real interest in being customers.
That is why you need to develop a strong niche following
as opposed to a large following.

The bottom line here is you do NOT want a large list of
followers. You want an EFFECTIVE list of followers.

Some may consider this notion to go against the grain in
which a Twitter account should be approached. After all,
Twitter is wildly popular so why not follow the trends? The
average Twitter account has changed dramatically since
July. The number of followers the average account maintains
has jumped from 70 to 300. This has led many accounts to
increase their number of postings. In July, the number was
in the range of 119. Today, it has jumped significantly to
420.

But, is there a great deal of benefit from such increases?
In all honesty, if the followers are not going to purchase,
the numbers do not really mean much. That means all those
increases in updates have less value as well. Again, you
want your efforts to be effective. Promoting volume in your
approach is not the way to achieve any true level of
success.

One problem with a large number of followers is that your
tweets need to be adjusted to handle larger volumes. That
means your tweets need to be clearly understood by all. As
such, you need to promote a generalized approach to the
tweets. This is not always the best method because you are
not providing detailed and specific information in the
tweets. This means those that are serious potential
customers may lose interest in the tweets or cease taking
them seriously. This is not a good thing if you are
seriously trying to sell a product or service.

It becomes a full time job to sort and respond to the real
people who are interested in you. Twittering without
engagement of your audience defeats the entire process of
marketing. I believe many people are using twitter as
“lets throw it out there and see what sticks”. I can tell
you from testing that this approach does not work. No
wonder people are leaving twitter in droves.

This leads to a more potentially serious side effect. If
more members of Twitter venture towards promoting generic,
uninteresting, and uninspiring tweets so as to boost the
volume of people reading, the health of the social network
site will not stay strong for long.

Basically, why would anyone would want to follow Twitter
when the tweets decline in value? This would certainly not
be a positive in terms of the ability for a small business
to procure new customers that are vital to the health of
the business.

Again, exploring options for expanding a business’ success
should center on niche marketing. This approach needs to be
taken with Twitter or else the value of Twitter will
decline. Based on what we are seeing, the decline will be
difficult to avoid in the future based on current actions.

Does this mean that Twitter is decidedly lacking in value
for those seeking to utilize what it has to offer? No, no
one is making such a statement as it would be a decidedly
inaccurate one.

Twitter, in fact, has taken steps to promote niche
marketing. This is evident in the ability to devise
“Twitter lists.” Twitter lists allow you to take certain
members of your massive group of followers and put them in
a particular category. You can then promote your tweets to
individual members of these various lists. So, you can
present wide, generic tweets as well as individualized
tweets to those that may be considered more serious
potential customers.

For example, you can create a group of people that have
already made purchases in the past. Then, you would be free
to issue tweets directly to such individuals as you wish.
This would be an effective form of niche marketing that
would be far more beneficial than putting forth perpetually
generalized tweets. One of the other problems with having
1,000′s of non-niched followers is seeing through the noise
of twitter.

As such, it is best to look towards growing these
individual lists in order to expand the potential to niche
market. Yet, many will seek to put forth the exact opposite
goal. They will look towards greatly expanding their number
of followers into the thousands while never stopping to
examine whether or not such a massive list truly boosts
their success potential. Such a strategy is a flawed one
that will not lead to the empirical success that is sought.

And, if you are not looking to succeed with your business,
then why even bother being in business? Twitter has
tremendous value and it delivers great benefit to those
looking to expand their small business’ promotional
strategies in a cost effective manner.

In conclusion, try not to become hung up on the notion
of greatly expanding your followers’ list. Seek to promote
effective niche marketing strategies instead.