The real power of twitter

When I first begun to work with twitter and set up twitter profiles for my clients, I tried to get as much followers for them as possible. Within a time of 2-3 months I was able to reach 15.000 – 20.000 Followers for some of those profiles. This was an amazing result, me and my clients were satisfied and everyone seemed to be happy.

But then they asked me to keep the twitteraccounts running, to update them regularly and to track the results.

So I did the usual – I tweeted about their products and services, published links to the websites within the tweets and this 20-30 times per day. I expected that the twitteraccounts with more than 20.000 followers would bring good clickrates – but this wasn´t so! Only 2-3 clicks – not more, the best rate was 6!

So what have I done wrong? Why are the marketing results of my twitteractivities so bad?

I didn´t gave up at this point, I created a large variety of tweets for the different products and services of my clients, tweeted regurlarly every hour a different tweet and waited for the results. These were even worse, 2-3 clicks per tweed maximum.

Only one tweet got more clicks:

I tweeted in my private Twitteraccount with at that time 2.800 Followers a question “What do you think of my new bloglayout? [URL]” And this tweet was clicked 14 Times and I good feedback to my design via tweetanswers and direct messages. I was very surprised, 5 of the answers came from people I already had build up a dialog in twitter and facebook. I answered them back, discussed about my design, gave feedback to their designs and step by step I got myself involved in a group of designers in twitter and tweeted with them every day just by personal interest.

So I finally found the secret of using twitter for good marketing results. It is not about selling things or getting traffic to your website (well not directly) – it is about communicating with people, building relationships with them and only in second step to sell services or products. People are not dump, they know it if the only reason why you are communicating with them is for to sell things to them – the result is that they will never read your tweet ever again…

So the most output you can get from twitter is to build up a smart list of followers, who share your interests and communicate with you. The list size is not so important as its responsiveness. The list size is only important for to impress people and customers, or to be listed good on wefollow.com – not more.

My advice to you is to build up a relationship with your followers, answer to their tweets, look at their websites, offer help, feedback or advices and get to know them better. Later you will be able to place offers to them, wich will interest them, or to build Jv´s…