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Is Twitter marketing still viable?

swecoder

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affiliate
Hello all,

I don't think there's an argument that Email-marketing is still viable and still pretty powerful. Every marketer should have a mailing list and should be able to monetize it (to various degree of course).

Twitter, however, feels like a different story to me. "Anyone" and their grandmother could have tens of thousands of followers on Twitter, but how many conversions do they get if they promote something? How many of their followers, regardless of how acquired, actually click their links? I can only look at myself, and that's a lesson I think every marketer should learn by the way, but how likely am I to click a link in my Twitter feed?

A rapidly built Twitter-following, even with the best of intentions, how powerful can it be? I have a method on paper to build a niche following on Twitter fairly quickly, but do you think I could monetize it?

There are different paths to the method:

a) Combine it with a niche "fire and forget" website (comment: shorter lifespan as visitors will notice a site hasn't been updated in a while?)
b) Twitter "only" (comment: lower CTR because of lack of site/content?)
c) Combine it with a niche website, building an organic following with dynamic and relevant content (comment: best long term option, but requires lots of work?)

I'm going to try them all, as I've built a piece of software that emulates many of Tweetadder's functions, but the question remains - how viable is Twitter as a marketing platform? Do people click links?
 
Do you mean that you have everything set up? Or that you're already getting subscribers/conversions?

Congrats on planning your work and working your plan!

Haha, sorry, that was during the BETA-phase of the Forum-setup. "It's all working" was meant to be "I can now post in the forums" ;-).

As for the plan, I actually started a new Twitter-account today for the sole purpose of promoting a project. I've found my niche keywords on Twitter and without any software, I'm currently at the modest rate of having followed 65 people and being followed by 15. This after less than 8 hours.

The challenge is to build relationships with your Twitter-followers, and not just follow/unfollow. If your followers are used to good tweets from you, they're more likely to click links.

My setup will always have at least 20-30 scheduled tweets in the pipeline, set up to be tweeted at least 3-4 per day at key times (between 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. EST). The tweets will be a mixture of random stuff and quality stuff (shoutouts to other Tweeters, links to niche related content from across the web). This will be used to build credibility.

To further enhance the credibility of the account, I will be retweeting some quality tweets in the niche, and every now and then I will (as mentioned) do some shout outs (quality tweets with a @-reference to one or many of my followers).

During this time, I will gradually follow people who follow major players in my niche with the mindset that "if they follow this guy who tweets about my niche, they're interested in this subject". I will be doing this both manually and programmatically.

I won't be promoting anything until I have at least 500 followers and 100 "quality" tweets.
 
I am interested in how this works out for you. I too have created a new twitter account. I have as of this minute 143 followers. I am following 683. I have had quite a bit of interaction with my followers.
Retweets and mentions.

I too realized that my interaction with twitter that I did not click on any ads "Google ads" to the places I was directed to.

I have just begun a program of going to 10 followers a day, going to their twitter page, and clicking on the link on the page. If the page is monetized by Google ad words or a CPA offer I engage it.

One of the things I have found is many pages do not have a link. Why?

I want to see if engaging my followers and making them a little money can cause them to engage my site.

By the way, I created my twitter page 9 days ago.
 
Okay, as you may know, I have a plugin for twitter in webDOM and it's been recently updated.

The plugin scripts are all open-source, but coded in my own scripting language build specifically for controlling webDOM.

Here's some things you might want to know about twitter. You or anyone else looking to automate it...
  1. There are a LOT of e-mails on twitter. Just try searching "@gmail.com" and you'll see plenty
  2. The method I've used in the past to generate an initial boost to traffic is doing targeted tweets to people who are talking about a specific set of keywords.
IF you target your followers correctly using the twitter search, and you do some "tweet to's" to them (Tweet Sniping?) ... you can basically generate traffic to a blog or website.

Case Study

I have this blog. It's a blog with only one post, and I never really actually intended to market it. It's in Spanish, so I won't get into details about the post contents, but it's about a horrible company in Bolivia called Tigo. They are an internet provider and have a 3g service. They market their expensive 3g service as "unlimited" but they actually limit the hell out of it and even invade your privacy by tracking every website you go to and actively banning sites based on how much bandwidth you use on them.

The blog gives people my personal story about why I hate this service, and then explains how to bypass their "traffic monitoring" software and their DNS. The overall niche market of the blog is very clear: people who hate the tigo 3g service, who live in Bolivia, and speak Spanish. The intention is to find who's talking trash about that specific service and then to tweet to them with a link back to my new blog post

What I did
  1. Made a new Blogger blog, wrote the single post... added widget for visit counting on the page (should have added AdSense there and then)
  2. Opened up webDOM and went into the twitter plugin. I then, did a search on these keywords
    1. tigo 3g mierda (tigo 3g shit - in spanish, they love calling things that suck "shit")
    2. tigo 3g odio (odio = hate)
    3. tigo 3g jodido (jodido = fucked)
  3. On each search, I gathered to the same list of users. Luckily, there were a lot of people in bolivia on twitter at the time tweeting about how shit their internet was.
  4. I made a message in the Message Manager that says roughly this (but in spanish): You hate tigo as much as I do? I figured out how to make their 3g service unlimited for real. [short link]
  5. Using the Tweet To action in webDOM, I tweeted this message to about 200 people from the list.
If you looked at the blog linked earlier in this post, you may ask yourself at this point: wait, is that it? Yes. There were only about 200 people who recently tweeted about this, and in an hour the entire method was done.

The Results

My overall results is that since 2011 I've had over 116,000 visits to that blog.... a blog with only one post. I remind you that I did this all in literally one night, including writing that long ass blog post and getting corrections on my spanish. I put up some google AdSense on the blog, but really it was too late. I missed the surge of hits from the beginning.

You'll notice the blog still gets quite a few visitors every day, and I haven't touched it since 2011. A couple of years ago I looked into where the traffic was coming from, and it turns out I got quite a few retweets, as well as some people even linked to my blog post from their blogs or websites. I even get organic hits from google on it.

If I had really taken this blog seriously and started advertising on it from the beginning, I could have probably generated some good cash off of it, and gained many more hits using the same method. People still bitch on twitter today about that service being shit. So in the end I guess it didn't change much of the situation in Bolivia, lol.
 
Very interesting post there webDOMinator.. I haven't been logged in here for a few months, but decided to visit today and check to see what's going on. I assume the webDOMinator service is something you've built yourself? Also, you say you sent this as a direct message to about 200 people or did you write "regular" tweets with their names in the tweet?

My own endeavor didn't really pan out due to serious neglect. I bought a new apartment and it feels like I've been moving non stop since October last year :).

I didn't continue development of my own software but I discovered Buffer and using their free service I have randomly added about 100 tweets the last few months. I had an old Twitter account for a specific niche and without much work that account now has about 400 followers..

I've extensively used niche-specific hashtags in my posts, and I'm pretty sure a majority of my new followers are niche-specific.
 
Twitter marketing is still the most important social media marketing field for sure. There is a huge audience potential on Twitter and if you don't know how to use it, you're just missing out so much potential.

However so many business and startups owners haven't got much time to use Twitter for marketing purposes, because they need to be engaging with their audience in a regular basis to create loyality.

There are some Twitter automation tools out there but how accurate they are? Another problem is that they are mostly bot basis systems and giving you followers but not real or most importantly not relevant to your niche so you might end up thousands of fake follower who don't engage, don't retweet or most importantly not likely to convert into paying customers.

I won't make it long, sorry :)

There is something I want to shout out here; we have just published our very own and the world first hybrid Twitter tool. When I say hybrid I mean a combine of human and computer effort. We have our real full time working social media experts managing your twitter account real time with the help of technology, and also you will be editing your own Twitter campaign once it's live.

We call it TweetRocket and it's live on IndieGoGo at the moment, if you have time and check our campaign page out, we would appreciate that so much. Even if it's not useful for you, it might be useful for your friends and please sahre it with your friends on social media accounts. You can find the link below, please go and have a look at ideas and how does it work, thanks guys ;)

Tweet Rocket - Twitter Taken Care Of!
 
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