Twitter – good marketing tool or just for fun

Recently, we conducted a couple experiments by using twitter heavily to drive people to a couple websites. When we say heavily, we mean really heavily. We got over 900 followers in 5 days and submitted over 170 posts, many of them containing links to the websites.

To do this, we simply searched for people and companies in the area and started following them. In turn, about 50% of them followed us back. It was pretty easy, but very time consuming.

What we found was that people were eager to follow our "tweets" and become our friends, but when push came to shove it didn’t drive many people to the websites. Furthermore, the traffic it did create wasn’t quality traffic. It drove a small amount of people to the sites but they only viewed the page that was posted and nothing more.

The problem with Twitter when it comes to driving traffic is you cannot easily target people who would be interested in your website. By not having a more sophisticated way to target people based on interests and narrowed down demographics it is simply not worth the time to use Twitter as a traffic driver. In fact, we were flooded by messages from other marketing people trying to do the same thing as us. This obviously dilutes the marketplace and reduces the effectiveness of a Twitter campaign.

There are other ways of driving traffic to your website that will give a higher return on your investment including: word of mouth, forums, online video, pay-per-click advertising, blogs and search engine optimization.

Created 08/10/09. Copyright © 2009 Tekniq Data Corp.