I have to break from my normal kind of blog to transcribalise (I’m just trying this made-up word out) about something I feel strongly about. Marketing on Twitter. Marketing on Twitter is lazy, unprofessional and what I call “throw enough shit and hope some of it sticks” marketing methodology.
Essentially these Marketer’s either use a kind of program that will automatically follow you if you use a particular keyword, or click to follow you themselves if you tweet said keyword, regardless of the context. So you might tweet “I love marketers. I’m actually excited about the opportunity of throwing my money at any of their affiliates”. If you do so, you will undoubtedly get a number of new marketer followers. However you might also tweet “I hate marketers. In fact if so much as one more starts to follow me I’m likely to go postal and start killing people”, with exactly the same result. What I’m saying is whether you are genuinely open to marketing opportunities or not you will get the ‘bots’ of these grinning fools following you regardless. Oh joy.
Personally I plainly state on my bio “ABSOLUTELY NO MARKETING”, yet clearly these people/bots have no genuine interest in their potential customers. They see no reason to get to know their customers or market, they simply click (or have a program click it for them) “Follow”. This is fantastically lazy, highly unprofessional and goes against all the marketing training I have ever received, which, believe me, is damn substantial.
I worked in marketing and sales for a number of years. It was my job to build relationships with business professionals over the phone or over email. From day one I recognised that unless you know what you customer likes/wants/needs you will not get anywhere. In fact, whenever I spoke to a ICT Director or Financial Director whose company I realised were not in the market I was focussing on, I’d simply laugh and say “I guess we may as well be chimney sweeps then!” as a light hearted way of ending the call (actually that sounds quite naff as I read it back, but I always had a positive response using it). A relationship must be had with the customer on some level before they will buy from you. This is the very basic premise of sales and marketing. So why is this completely forgotten? Why do internet marketers lazily get a program to do this for them?
The answers to these questions are thus; percentages. If you add thousands of followers, a small percentage will follow you back. Of that small percentage, a smaller percentage will follow your links and buy from you or your affiliates. So, apparently, the more people you follow the more you will ultimately sell, and Marketers therefore think using a program to randomly follow people is a viable and inexpensive means of ‘getting your word out there’. This is false. It is more likely to irritate people and reflect your company as ignorant, lazy and unprofessional.
The majority of Twitter then users who perhaps are not interested in being sold to in this way have to accept it as a necessary evil of using the Twitter service. I find this unacceptable.
An example of this is when I started to be followed by a real-estate company in the US. I’m a mature student in the United Kingdom studying English Literature. I have no ambition to live in the US, buy property in the US or even consider doing so in the future. What made me a ‘target market’? The answer is ignorance and laziness on the part of the company, and that is all.
Marketers take numerous forms. ‘Internet Marketers’, ‘Marketing Guru’s’, ‘SEO Guru’s’ so on and so forth. The most common image seems to be the following; teeth white enough to suspiciously look like low level radiation, a corny profile shot which shows a flashy suit and a fake ‘mouth-only’ smile- (in other words their eyes are just aren’t interested). It is sometimes accompanied by a profile that displays a pile of cash or some kind of capitalist display of wealth. they usually have thousands of people that they follow, yet a much lower figure are following them. Their tweets will themselves be a number of sales links to whatever they want you to buy accompanied by a ‘too good to be true’ slogan ‘Win ‘x” ‘Earn $$$ thousands from home’ etc. All of which is cloying, tacky and has clearly been given no thought.
The answer?
I’d like to call for Twitter to either ban or regulate these people. Alternatively, maybe the Marketing community on Twitter should begin to follow a few simple yet effective techniques to get followers.
1. Get to know your market. You want their money, the least you can do is see whether they even fit your target market. Have a look at their profile and try and ascertain their interests. If they look like they might be interested, then and only then follow them.
2. Make yourself followable. Nobody wants to be sold to. Be yourself. Talk about your own interests and what you did at the weekend. People are more likely to follow you if you are not always selling to them.
3. Build relationships. Be a good follower, comment on what people tweet about. Marketing can be soul destroying at the best of times, at least try and enjoy yourself. This way you will come across as a genuine person and attractive to customers.
4. Be consistent. Tweet regularly, do not just ram links and ads down people’s throats.
5. Invest time on Twitter. Get to know trends and the things people talk about. There is no quick-fix to marketing, organic relationship-based selling/marketing will always be more fruitful than hammering people with ads.
6. Message your followers. Thank them for following you, ask their opinions. People love answering questions about themselves, its human nature. Ask them for feedback.
7. Ask questions in your ads. When you sell to them, try using their own curiosity; ask a question or pose a scenario. External links or follow-up tweets can be used to provide the answer (your product). It’s gentle yet effective.
8. Know when to walk away. If they are not interested, then thank them for their time and walk away. If you leave them with a least a memorable positive response, they might remember you in the future if your product does become relevant to them, or even recommend you to a friend.
9. Organically build a list of followers yourself. By doing so you will at the very least have a number of people who respect you and your company, and therefore their minds are open to what you have to say. This kind of ‘database’ is clean, targeted, relevant and open to you.
10. Be original. Marketers on Twitter seem to be doing very few of the above, you can be the first!
11. Stop smiling like a deranged fool . It looks creepy. If you looked at a child with that face you’d be placed on a register.
Sorry to my usual readers for going on about this. I just had to get it off my chest because it’s so frustrating to get hammered by internet marketers on a daily basis when they clearly haven’t taken the time to know who they are following. Especially when this is really basic stuff. I’m going to tag this to death to ensure that as many people searching for this kind of advice will read this. Who knows, it could start a debate about an internet marketing code of practice that helps companies target the right people, as well as allowing non commercial Tweeters the freedom to enjoy the service without a barrage of adverts. I live in hope.
I invite anyone in the industry to tell me where I’m wrong. This is all based purely on my own experience, both as a Twitter and 12 years working in selling and marketing IT/Recruitment/Financial Services.
I have been followed by 7 marketers while typing this blog. None of whom appear to be able to read.
As ever, thank you for reading.
