My Personal Experience Using Twitter
You’ve probably heard of Twitter but may be wondering what it is exactly and how do you use it to further your online business. That’s a good question, the same question I had so I decided to give it a go.
I registered an account with twitter and did a name search looking for some well known internet marketers like Frank Kern, Mike Filsaime, etc.. and followed them.
Within minutes I had people wanting to follow me. Being unsure on the best way to use Twitter, I followed back pretty much everyone that followed me. In less than two days I had over 500 followers.
That’s when I discovered that Twitter seemed pretty useless to me for any practical application like trying to receive information for one or two sources that I actually wanted to hear from because it turned into a major ad fest.
Everybody was trying to sell everyone else something. It became impossible to see tweets from the people you wanted to see tweets from.
I still have that account but it is mainly there just to watch and see what happens and how other people are using it. I registered two more accounts, one where I followed the major news sources and another I followed only the people I wanted to receive tweets from and so far that has worked out well.
Believe it or not, I still get a bunch of followers on those accounts but I don’t follow them back. I’m sure they will unfollow in a week or so as I’ve read about automated software that will make these follow requests and then unfollow if you don’t follow them back.
From what I’ve been able to see, there could be some good uses for Twitter if you planned it out in advance.
Twitter would be good to keep your customers up to date say with new software releases or specials you are running or even to provide timely information to your membership site customers though your tweet would probably get lost in a sea of other tweets and sending out a quick email through Aweber would be much more effective.
I’m sure there are plenty of more effective ways to use Twitter but it just doesn’t fit into my current business plan at this moment. Perhaps later I will pick up an ebook and see if I can’t find a way to actually use it to my advantage.
I can see your point, but since blogs can automatically post to Twitter, I don’t see it as a bad thing. People see the link and ping back when necessary. Also, people can send you private @ messages send messages directed at you that are easily sorted out.
I would never send it to my cell phone because I get thousands of tweets an hour, but I definitely check my private and @ messages and let my blog update twitter on a business level. I use both twitter and rss for getting the word out.
Otherwise, I have no use for Twitter on a personal level. If someone wants to know what I’m doing they can IM me. It’s easier and more private.