I am really getting tired of writing about Twitter and I am sure you probably are just as tired of reading about it. However, several of my clients are asking about Twitter’s value which brings up some great conversations and outstanding points on Twitter’s questionable worthiness as an effective Social Media and Marketing tool. There is absolutely no doubt that there are millions or trillions of people, places and things on Twitter.

Anyone can test that count by going to the Twitter Timeline and taking a look. But…be warned if you do. The volumes of posts to read will blur your vision for life. There is such a volume of information data statements facts gossip humor remarks words hitting the screen that it is like attempting to get a drink out of a fire hose.  No, that is not an original description but next to the photo I used here in this blog is so far the most visually graphic to how the information on Twitter is delivered.

The next question I am faced during these many conversations I am having is why do the people who are on Twitter feel having more followers and follow more people than they can physically effectively communicate with is effective Social Media?   As one of my clients asked….

What’s up with these people on Twitter who gather 50,000 Followers, and just as many people Following them, the have no conversation..just URL Links to something worthless?  I get the feeling since there are so many people on Twitter who feel they need to be popular that Twitter must be where the High School Cheerleaders go when they graduate?  These people (I assume they are people) with large numbers of followers and following give me the impression they are only on Twitter for themselves and could give a crap about the people they send truckloads of stuff out to in an effort to get them to Look At Them. I see no value in what they offer and if what they offered was of value I would be put off in the volumes of stuff they post on Twitter.

That is another acute observation from a newbie to Twitter. It takes about ten minutes on the Twitter feed to get the Fire Hose method of social media.  

Who’s Filling the Hose?

There are peeps who unload constant @replying to followers with sugary perky remarks and unbelievable sentences structured around 140 characters in hopes it lures in the peeps who happen to read their post.  These posts on Twitter are made one right after another for what could be for hours.

Then throw in the thousands of businesses who post, what they think are, clever statements with a url link in hopes people will open them.  Combined all this together with the few people using Twitter as a true Social Media tool and you have a full out 3 inch 20 BAR Pressure hose FULL of unusable information hitting you straight to the face.

Yaw, baby…nothing like a blur of posts on effective uses for dirty baby diapers to teach you to use Twitter without a filter like TweetDeck or Hootsuite.

With that said, what is the value of someone whose mission is to build business relationships for being on Twitter if their Social Media efforts are going to be totally lost in the zillions of other posts being made all at once? The answer: The value is 0 and in most cases goes to negative numbers quickly since it becomes a complete waste of time unless you use a Twitter feed filter like Hootsuite or TweetDeck.  These utilities slow down the information being posted on Twitter to come in from only the peeps in the Follow list. This makes the need for trillions of followers and following MOOT.

Before social media practitioners I found felt playing the number game on Twitter, builds up a large audience of people to market info to, is following a true marketing principle. This attitude usually was stemmed from the large box marketing firms heavy investment into old school marketing methods for which they were attempting to squeeze out as much of an ROI from as they could.

Now Social Media professionals who deal with reality, which there now many, agree that the times of playing the number game changed with the fall of the world’s economy. Having more followers than can be managed is now seen as obscene and very anti-productive to any real effort to market any REAL type of product or service.

The term Target Marketing has been used a lot over the past ten years with only a few marketers really understanding of what Target Marketing does.  Posting random posts on the Twitter Feed is not target marketing.  Posting info to a selected controlled community is Target Marketing..for which Twitter is not built to provide.  The Twitter feed filters can sharpen the view of what the Followers have to say, but research is showing each day that over 85% of the Followers people have on Twitter are not reading what 90% of people post. SO the value of posting on Twitter commercially is getting near to 0.

Gone is the thinking that if millions of eyes see something some of them are bound to want to buy something. That thinking went out with the Roadside Billboards that lined the highways of America…and still do. All they are doing now is contributing to blocking the view of real conversations being held on the Fire Hose Twitter.

Its time to move on to reality, build tools to get to the people in the market that are your customers.   Businesses are going to have to move quickly to finding ways to getting to know the person who just wrote them a check to make sure they will be back to write another one.   Let me know how I can help.