Is Twitter past its marketing prime?
Twitter is hugely successful — but that phenomenal growth may be hurting its potential as a marketing platform, argues Dan Schawbel in the lead item from today’s SmartBrief on Social Media.
Schawbel writes that the impact of each individual tweet diminishes as Twitter gets more users and each user follows more and more people. With everyone’s feeds becoming increasingly crowded, the odds that any given tweet will have an impact become smaller and smaller, he writes.
Of course, Schawbel writes that Twitter still has plenty of other business applications — he notes that it’s still great for research, recruitment and customer service, among other tasks. But the network’s days of being a easy way to generate buzz may be gone forever.
Are Twitter’s best days as a marketing platform behind it? Is there any way for the network to restore its effectiveness as a buzz engine?
Image credit, Dmitry Nikolaev, via Shutterstock
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Tags: marketing, recruiting, social media, twitter
Categories: Editor's Take
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Posted by Jeff Weidauer on May 18th, 2010 at 4:54 pm
Twitter's effectiveness as a marketing tool lies in its ability to measure the total conversation in aggregate, for whatever value that provides to marketers. As a marketing medium that allows one to release information to the masses it's becoming less effective because it's become a shouting match with no one listening.
Posted by @marksbirch on May 18th, 2010 at 5:07 pm
This has the same gloom and doom tone as cloud computing is overrated, Facebook is dead and other such silliness. The fact is that Twitter is a great tool of many for savvy marketers to leverage. There is "noise" everywhere, but you can still have effective television spots, billboards, print ads, direct mail, email blasts, etc. The is the mark of a great marketing person; getting the message to the audiences and making it stand out.
What is maybe more applicable to say is that all the marketing 101 tricks are not going to be as effective because all of those things have been tried already. They can still be effective, but marketers need to be smarter about the outreach.
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Posted by Joe Buhler on May 18th, 2010 at 11:49 am
One of those attention grabbing headlines favored by some gurus! Maybe for a few power users who use Twitter as a sales tool this might be an issue. Of course, a casual follower is not as valuable as a subscriber to an e-mail list. A straight comparison is not valid except for those who use both for the same purpose. As for marketing – and branding is part of it, as is customer service – Twitter remains a very useful tool and will remain so for some time. Even if Twitter should disappear, something like it will play that role. There is too much focus on the tactical tools rather than on an integrated marketing approach that today must include the social web as a core component.
Posted by @znmeb on May 18th, 2010 at 7:35 pm
As a Twitter application developer, I'm appalled when self-appointed gurus throw up statistical FUD like Mr. Schwabel has in his article! So I will throw the challenge right back at him – stop whining about Twitter and help build the tools to market with Twitter! Because that's what some of us Twitter developers are doing, including people inside Twitter.
My recent post Twenty-Five Years And Counting
Posted by Walter Adamson on May 20th, 2010 at 4:08 am
I’m on board with @marksbirch, Joe Buhler and @znmeb – who cares? It’s about how you use the tool and that’s all that matters. If you execute, review and act then you can fine tune Twitter’s role, or decide to direct your energy elsewhere. What an expert decides about Twitter is irrelevant. Not that Dan Schwabel is irrelevant, he did great work with EMC.
Walter Adamson @g2m
http://xeesm.com/walter
Posted by Annelie Näs on June 2nd, 2010 at 7:07 am
I don’t think that Twitters prime time has past, instead I think we are starting to use it and to “market” in other ways. We are more focused on local updates and hashtag marketing, and we find groups and list to share information on what is interesting. In other words the buzz functions are changing, but not disappearing. So I agree with many of the previous commentors.