Twitter is NOT for spam
- Mark Pesce
- 27 May 2009
You’ve probably been hearing a bit about Twitter lately; whether on Rove Live or the ABC, it seems to be the topic of the hour. Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore are said to have used Twitter at the Academy Awards; Jane Fonda and John McCain – both in their 70s – also Twitter. But what’s the point? Seriously, why should you care?
As more people join Twitter, it begins to resemble a huge switchboard where millions of people (Twitter has over 10 million users) come together to share what they’re doing, in bite-sized chunks of 140 characters or less. They’re accessing Twitter from the web, on their smartphones, or from a growing array of applications like TweetDeck, twhirl, and Australia’s own PeopleBrowsr.
Twitter may be the best tool yet invented for the lively art of conversation. It might be a personal, practical or business conversation – but, like all good conversations, it works best when there’s a lot more listening than speaking.
Right now, as Twitter rises in popularity, there’s a lot of people proclaiming it is a marketer’s best friend. This is a pernicious lie: nothing could be further from the truth. Twitter isn’t about marketing; it’s about having conversations in a public forum where others can look in and contribute to them.
If anything, Twitter is the best anti-marketing tool yet invented, because you can always choose not to listen. When people smell marketing on Twitter, they immediately mute that conversation. Twitter is where people get real, and that excludes most marketing.
So, why does Twitter matter to a business? This is where things get a little more subtle, and require a bit of forethought. You can use Twitter to send Tweets – to ‘talk’ – or you can use Twitter to listen. For small to medium businesses, it’s far more interesting (and important to your business) to use Twitter to listen. The listening side of the conversation is where you learn important things – such as how your customers really feel about your business.
Don’t get me wrong. If you want to, you can use Twitter to spray your followers with marketing messages every half hour. But Twitter is an ‘opt-in’ medium. People choose to follow you. If you start spamming them with continuous messages to boost your sales, you’ll soon find no one wants to listen to you. I don’t mean to say that you should never use Twitter as a sales tool but, rather, that it should be done judiciously. Perhaps once a week. Think twice before you send any spam-like Tweets. Otherwise, I guarantee you’ll anger your followers.
If you turn things around, and use Twitter as a tool to listen to your clients, you get a different picture of what Twitter is: an incredible customer service tool. Join Twitter, then let your clients know that you can be reached via Twitter for any questions or issues. Their questions and your replies are both public – which means that potential customers can see the kind of high quality service your offer to your clients. That’s the best kind of advertising any business can have, and it’s out there, freely available for everyone to see. That’s the power of Twitter, used wisely.
