An experiment in Twitter Marketing
A friend explained the rough outline of how she's been using Twitter to market products. I hired her to sell a product I had, and it worked very well. The description she gave sounded like something I might be able to develop myself so I've been experimenting in various methods of building Twitter followers.
The essence of Twitter marketing is to get a sizable number of people to follow you, then tweet about products they might be interested in. Tweet too much and you'll run many of them off. Tweet too little and you'll not be using the full potential of the marketing vehicle. So there's a delicate balance in how it ultimately is done.
But before you can tweet, you have to build the followers.
Her method was to search for people that use specific keywords, follow them, and a percentage will automatically follow her back. There are a lot of programs out that promise to increase followers, but random followers are useless for marketing purposes since their interests are so varied, and inevitably you’ll get many that are also marketers, who won’t be reading any tweets.
I began three different approaches on three different accounts.
One, I used her approach. I wrote a script that captures the user names of Twitter users who used keywords that would indicate they are in the demographic I wanted to target (this one was Christians)
Another I simply tweeted about 4 or 5 times in the morning (or through the day as the opportunity arose) about a specific subject. This one target Politically minded Conservatives.
The last account I created a script to grab the news feed from as many local (Tulsa) news outlets as I could, and tweeted the headlines with a link back to the original story. It has been running about a week, tweeting several dozen tweets a day.
A week ago each account had roughly 300 followers. After of week of using each technique the first account (the bulk follow technique) now has 458 followers. The second account (using the personal tweeting method) now has 469 followers. The last account (using local news feeds) now has 451 followers.
The results are close enough to say that they are more or less statistically in a dead heat.
The pros of the first method (bulk follow) are that it is capable of targeting a more specific demographic and it runs on its own, without my need to do much. The cons are that the followers followed as a courtesy, not necessarily because they actually wanted to read my tweets and finally, serious Twitter users frown on this technique.
The pros of the second method (personal tweeting) are that the followers are definitely more interested in what my tweets say, but the cons are that the demographic is a bit more vague and it takes time to do (about an hour a day).
The pros of the third method (news feeds) are that it runs on automatic, requiring little attention from me, the demographics are specific to the targeted group and those following the account do so because they want to read the tweets. The cons are that it would be hard to duplicate the method for any demographic other than a locality, unless you could track down a sufficient number of news feeds specific to the interests of the desired demographic.
At the rate each are growing, I should be able to have a adequate marketing pool in several months. Unfortunately, the first method and account I set up to market a product for Christmas, so it looks like it may not be big enough, soon enough.
The first and third also require scripts to do. The first method has script or services available (for a fee) to do for you. The third method I’m not aware of any script or serve that will do it for you, except for the one I wrote (which i may be marketing next year if it proves successful).
Posted by Danny Carlton at October 10, 2009 12:47 PM