eSpire Marketing

I was stumbling once again along the Warrior Forum to find an interesting thread where a person was asking is Twitter worth the effort?

Unfortunately the answer is not all that simple. First you have to ask yourself a few questions. One, who is your audience and are they on Twitter? Two, what are you trying to do with Twitter? Three, does Twitter fit into your time budget? And Lastly how will you measure Twitter Success? I’m going to be attempting to clarify each question for you throughout the rest of this article.

The first question is a question that everyone should always ask themselves before getting into any endeavors with their business or marketing plan. Who is your audience? If you don’t know the answer to that question, you had better find a new profession and quickly, this economy is not a forgiving one, and there is certainly no room for businesses that don’t know their market. Is your audience using Twitter? do a little bit of research behind this one. Use Twitter Search and search for some of your market’s main keywords, if there is a lot of conversation about your product, genre, or niche then you might be onto something. If not, don’t waste your time. There are plenty of other great places to spend your time trying to acquire customers.

If you decide that you’re going to set up a Twitter account for your business the next question to ask yourself would be, what are you trying to do with Twitter? Just like anything else you have to have a common goal in mind and a plan to reach that goal. Do you want overall brand awareness? Another place to share your blog links? Or do you want to drive direct traffic and sales through Twitter. Whichever way you decide to go there are a different marketing techniques and best practices in order to get you to that next level.

Does Twitter fit into your time budget? We all know that Twitter is a free service and that Dell claims they made $1 Million in sales on Twitter last year, but are you Dell? The answer to that question for most of us is a definite NO! It is going to take time to build your Twitter following, and in my experience from a direct sales standpoint with Twitter, it takes a longer time to actually get people to want to purchase from you. So figure out if it is worth your time to start the campaign before you do.

The last question you’ll want to ask yourself is how will you judge Twitter success? This should go hand in hand with the reasons you are joining Twitter in the first place, but if you aren’t getting those sales right off the bat, how will you measure success? How are you going to measure the amount of brand awareness Twitter is bringing you? These are generally answered through whatever analytics program you use for your site but make sure you have this in mind as well.

After you have asked yourselves all of these questions I think you’re going to be well on your way to getting started with Twitter. You’ll certainly be well ahead of about 85% of the Twitterverse anyway. The reason my company has stopped spending time on Twitter is because of the infestation of the spam community and the lack of sales directed through Twitter. It has however been a great traffic driver to specific content that we are trying to push. Now that you know the questions you should ask yourself, start answering them already will you!? I mean time is money people! Have a good one.