I joined Twitter back in 2009 - when all of this hubbub started - and like everyone else I wondered about its value, at least as far as marketing is concerned. I'm still wondering, especially with the current climate in the "Twitterverse."
Twitter, after all, is just a simple communications tool - no more, and no less. And like any tool, it can be used efficiently and effectively to share ideas and concepts, or it can be abused and end up creating more confusion and "information overload" for everyone involved.
I've never bothered with "Twitter auto-follow" (AKA "friend adding") software, because I saw it (as it has been pointed out more than once in this thread) as "cheating." I hold the philosophy that if you want people to "follow" you, then you've got to give them a solid reason to do so.
But it seems that very few so-called "marketers" just don't.
To them, it's just another strategic platform, a "high vantage point" from which they can indiscriminately spray everyone with their endless spam pitching their "deal." After these sort of tactics pretty much ended MySpace's reign as "the social network of choice" for most people, MySpace was forced to pretty much "re-invent" themselves in an attempt to stem the mass migration of their members to Facebook and other social networks. They're finding it extremely difficult to "un-do" the damage already done to their image, and to their mrket share as well.
Mr. Zuckerberg actually owes a debt of gratitude to those spammers for causing this, but now he and Facebook are starting to find themselves in a similar predicament.
(Microsoft's "Live" social network has never even really got off the ground, with spammers poised at the gate and they practically took it over completely the very day it was launched to the public! Have you noticed the "cloud" ads on TV, which are really an attempt to pump up the membership numbers in the "Live" community by providing "cool stuff" to their members. )
What I feared back in '09 has indeed come to pass with Twitter as well, with so-called "marketers" polluting the atmosphere with an inpenetrable fog of spam and self-aggrandizement, and completely alienating the very people they're trying to reach with their message (if they actually have one other than "buy my stuff").
I believe that if Mike hadn't engaged in the "auto-follow" tactics that he did, and not "outsourced" his "tweets" and had instead simply "tweeted" regularly with information that had value and let it be known that people could "follow" him, then even though he may not have built a following of 10,000+ those followers that he would have acquired would have been much more attentive to his "tweets" and would have been much more inclined to act on them when asked to do so.
(Of course, hindsight is golden, and we all have times when we say to ourselves, "If only I had done that this way instead of what I actually did, how different would things be right now?" I choose not to dwell on such things, note the lesson learned, and simply continue to move forward.)
Twitter is one of the very few places online where "if you build it, they will come" still applies. I subscribe to the philosophy that you should only follow who you want to follow - because you want to hear what they have to say, and not just because you want to somehow rope them into your "deal." If you start building your timeline with more good stuff and fewer pitches to "buy your stuff," you'll find your list of followers steadily growing with people who are actually listening to you.
Big difference!
If there's a "secret" to using Twitter, that's it! (And I didn't charge you a single penny for it
)The one thing that you just can't "outsource" is you - which is the very "soul" and "persona" of your business in the first place. I think that's what Mike discovered with his Twitter "experience." That concept is pretty much true in any form of social media, and any attempts at "automation" are pretty transparent to regular members of the community. Any success is almost always short-lived, and pretty much obsolete by the time a "product" is released telling how to duplicate.
But for some strange reason, that very simple concept continues to escape those "old-school gurus" who just don't seem to comprehend it as they attempt to "automate" a process that's almost always much more effective when left to more "organic" methods.
Instead, they try to capitalize on it in any way they can think of . (Remember, to some of these guys their only motivation is to explode their immediate bottom line!) After all, the professional "product launchers" know that when the cash flow from this "product" starts to slow down, they'll just crank out another "product" over the weekend that'll bring them five or six figures when they ultimately decide to "launch" it.
And thus the circular "IM game" continues...
Again, Twitter is simply another communications tool that can be used right, or it can be abused (sometimes even causing serious injury to one's image as a result of that abuse). Just be leery of anyone who says they're a "master" of Twitter, especially if they want to charge you for their "non-secrets."
