About six months ago I thought Twitter was stupid. I have changed my mind although I think it is still over-rated.
I have started experimenting with my own Twitter account at:
I barely tweet, but noticed that if I do place a URL about something, my followers do actually click.
This got me thinking about Twitter as an effective communication tool (if not abused).
I spent some time trying to find out marketers who know Twitter really well. I found a lot of marketers with tens of thousands of followers, but something did not make sense.
I see numbers like this:
23,543 Followers and 21,435 Following
Having over 20,000 followers is impressive, but how the heck do they follow over 20,000+ other people.
Everytime they hit refresh, they must end up with a new page of tweets.
Then the BS detector went off. Ding. Ding. Ding.
Upon further investigation, I didn’t realize that their are tools out there that allow users to auto-follow other users when a user signs up to follow their tweets.
Great way to inflate your follower numbers. But the problem is that these are not *real* followers. You are just attracting other people who also want to inflate their numbers.
What I see happening is that the users with the most *real* followers will have the best opportunity to monetize with Twitter.
Twitter reminds me of a book written by Seth Godin titled “The Idea Virus”. He writes about finding people who *influence* your niche the most and getting them to spread your idea.
The Twitter users with the large followings will be the influencers (i.e. Oprah). If you could just get one of these influencers to tweet about your product or service, what would that do for your sales?
Something to think about.
I am also looking at other ways people are monetizing with Twitter and will include that in a little report I am putting together for you that details my Twitter experience.
But I think the companies that are going to make big money are the ones that build secondary Twitter services.
Here are a few good ones.
TweetDeck
http://www.tweetdeck.com
You can customize your Twitter experience by creating your own tweet browser that can also include Facebook.
TweetBeep
http://www.tweetbeep.com
Anytime someone mentions your name or product on Twitter, you can get an email alert.
TwitterCounter.com
http://www.twittercounter.com
This is like a huge data center for what is happening on Twitter.
FutureTweets.com
http://www.futuretweets.com
You can actually send out tweets in the future. Very similar to an autoresponder.
And the list goes on!
I will place all these great Twitter resources and more that I have discovered in the nice little report for you, so stay tuned.
