Twitter: A Serious Marketing Channel?
I’ve been pretty active on my Twitter account in the last couple of weeks and whilst tweeting some random thoughts (or communicating with friends), I often wonder whether it is worth my time to actually commit even a hour a day to Twitter. My thoughts on the matter obviously comes from my business-orientated mind, where everything I do on a daily basis needs to be considered from a financial / return-on-investment mindset (I work for myself and thus time is money and ultimately my financial livelihood).
Before I started really using Twitter, I subscribed to the general perception that it was simply a very niche-focused tool that just eat away at your productive time. Sure, the evangelists would’ve argued otherwise, but then evangelists aren’t the most objective people you’d find… And this was exactly my opinion / mindset, until I started noticing something else…
Referals
I check my Google Analytics stats quite regularly, as I’m keen to know what you like to read and thus be able to determine how I can further grow my blog. So whilst keeping these tabs on my blog’s performance, I started noticing that Twitter was sending more and more visitors to my site - which I found quite strange to say the least, as I wasn’t even using it that often!?
But as I was increasing my usage on Twitter, these referals slowly started increasing… Traffic analytics from the last 30 days shows that I’ve received a significant 1860 visitors that were redirected from my Twitter account - that is incredible, considering what it would cost for banner advertising to get that amount of visitors through to your blog / website.
Current State
I currently only follow about 100 people (I’m very lazy when it comes to following my followers and I know that this isn’t “right-on” with Twitter ethics) and I have about 300 followers. So between those 300 followers, I’m getting about 6 visits / follower (on average) in a 30 day period. So again… Considering the cost of advertising online and the CTR’s involved with those, I think it is safe to assume that Twitter is indeed a viable marketing channel. Right!?
So what’s the answer?
I’m leaning towards saying “Yes! Definitely”, even though I have my reservations about Twitter as a marketing / communication channel. Yes, it is very niche-focused in my opinion (it will probably always be, considering my mom or dad will never be on Twitter) and a lot of my followers are probably RSS subscribers as well (which dilutes the significance of those 1860 visitors).
That said - looking at the pure figures involved, I’ve got to say that there’s marketing potential and value that should be explored for Twitter. Sure it is niche-focused, but surely then people involved in those niches should be using Twitter to promote themselves!?
What do you think?
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