I
recently joined Twitter. I know this puts me in whatever the next category is
after "latecomer." I joined because I do like being connected to what
other people are doing and there seem to be some valuable conversations
happening on there.
However, I haven't quite found those conversations yet and
the fluff-to-value ratio seems to be 571 to 1. And I've found my own impetus is
to tweet about truly trivial things, like the colorful insect I found on my
cypress tree or the way my raspberries went fuzzy one day after I bought them
at Trader Joe's. No one wants to hear about that, I reason. So I'm mostly in
observation mode and leaning toward a quiet exit.
But I
was interested - though not surprised - to read that just like every corner of
the Internet, Twitter is now allowing advertisers to target users based on
their interests. They're also slashing the price of their promoted tweets to
directly court those advertisers. This is something that probably would have
felt ominous two years ago, but now we're all used to it, thanks to Google and
Facebook. Everything we do online is watched and analyzed and parroted back to
us in the form of ads - we know this. And those of us who've checked our Google
personas know how wildly offbase that analysis can be. (Google thinks I'm
mostly interested in recording studios and swimwear, even though I spend all of
my leisure time online immersed in literary and science stuff.)
Twitter's
conversion rates have been debated, but its word of mouth power is
unparalleled. It's just so easy for someone to re-tweet something into a
phenomenon. In that sense, Twitter advertising does make sense not just for
major brands but even smaller businesses, who can sculpt their targets to
regional and interest-based specifications. It's no longer a question of hoping
for the finite result of one user clicking on one web ad. It's hoping that user
will re-tweet to followers who will re-tweet to their followers, exponentially
multiplying the impact to an extent Google ads couldn't dream of.
Overblown
as I feel most social media expectations are, I do think Twitter advertising
could be a smart option for small businesses who know how to tweet strategically.
It's just a matter of employing the mix of creativity and value that will get
noticed in the cacaphony that is the Twitterverse.
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