Twitter

Twitter is dead man. I once tweeted from an account that I was GIVING AWAY $5 for free to anyone who replied (just as an experiment), and I only got an 18% response rate. I had to explain to those who replied that it was merely to prove a point and I unfortunately wasn't going to give away all that money lol.

Marketers don't get it. You are right. You don't make money with twitter or facebook. The money is in the relationship with those you have. I have local friends who use twitter very regularly and actually interact with each other. I am sure that their response rate for a tweet is going to eclipse most marketer's tweets.

But then again, they have a relationship with the people they are talking to.

To make social sites work, you need one of two things...and preferably both....

1. A active relationship that is more involved than you having a hand in their pocket.
2. A reason for them to actually want to interact with you.

Most marketers who use social sites as "cash generators" have neither.

Hey Jack,

Twitter is still great - but you're right it is less responsive if your followers are not well targeted.

I find it just as good as always - but I don't follow the sort of people I used to and I tend to focus on specific real people on Twitter rather than 'my followers'.

It's all about how you use it - you can get it wrong and it sucks or you can give it the attention it needs and it's great.

Andy

I still generate lead and sales from Twitter, I agree that it has slowed down but if used correctly, it can be very valuable. The leads come from driving traffic to my Blog, from there, they become a lead, go through my sales funnel to make a purchase.
If all you are doing is sending a affiliate or cpa link, your wasting everyone's time including your own....

Heya Jack! Was surprised to bump into you here. (Don't know why, but there you go.)

To answer your question, now that the novelty of Twitter has worn of for most folks they seem to be more particular about what they click on. That said, I still get 30-35 click throughs on average when I post a link. With retweets I often see 200+ click throughs, which is far higher than I saw a couple years back. And I've got less than a third of your follower count even though I've been on Twitter nearly a year and a half longer.

Twitter is still one of the most effective social media sites for my business.

But, like some of the folks posting on this thread above have said, it's most effective with a targeted audience that is actively engaged.

As an aside, that's one of the reasons I'm not a fan of automated systems to build Twitter follower count. In most cases it's just an ego boost. The reality is that it's much better to "earn" followers by being interesting and engaging the Twitter community.

Doing so takes more time and results in fewer overall followers. But it more accurately represents your actual influence on Twitter and, I believe, yields better overall results.

Honestly though, knowing you, Jack, I think the biggest reason you are seeing better results on Facebook is that you put more effort connecting with people there than you do on Twitter. What we focus on expands, right?

That's not to say one is better than the other for everyone. But, for each of us individually, the one we put the most effort into will give us back the most results.

The same thing is true for me and Twitter. I put more effort into Twitter than I do on Facebook, so Twitter gives me better results.

In the last month, my Twitter 'connections':

* helped raise around $10,000 for my CHD work
* escalated a complaint all the way to top management, facilitating
release of locked up funds
* brought me into touch with someone who can help extend my fund-
raising to the US by getting non-profit status there
* resolved a problem with my new wireless Internet access
* introduced me to the President of one of India's largest non-
Government charitable organizations (NGOs)
* brought to my notice a national contest for non-profits using
social media, which could bring my work more visibility
* keeps me in touch with people who reach over a million others

The way Twitter helps is a lot more subtle and indirect than we're
used to thinking from a direct marketing standpoint.

I've always declared (since 2007) that Twitter is a very poor medium
for direct marketing/response - but an awesome channel for RELATIONSHIP
marketing and networking.

It still is.

All success

Dr.Mani
(@drmani on Twitter)

I tried today and nobody is responding...

It depends. If you blindly add random, non-targeted followers, you will get thousands of automated twitter spam bot followers who are just scripts, not real people.

If you act like a spam bot, you will spam stupid crap to other spam bots who ignore you. Then you claim making money on twitter is impossible.

You need to integrate tools with some manual work, careful targeting and actually talking to people. Then you can build a super targeted list from those people and go from there.

One of my twitter accounts has highly targeted local followers and a lot of those people add me as friend on foursquare, write comments on my blog posts, and I even met a few face to face. I also talk to them regularly on the phone, twitter and facebook. I am even starting JV deals with a couple of them soon. (I gave a bunch of free help to some of them and they love me for it)

If you take the time to build a relationship with people, then you can make money.

Here is what facebook/twitter money makers do: They invite people to free webinars first (targeted people who are interested in the niche and added to twitter lists, fan pages & facebook groups), give them some damn good content, get them on the list, give them free chapters of the next upcoming product for review, answer their questions, then upsell coaching sessions and what not. This is how people like Milli Ponce make tons of money on social media. Not just IM niche but I know a whole bunch of life coaches & self help/NLP folks who are making a killing this way.


(This little paragraph I just wrote is a super concentrated, tightly bundled piece of gold. I could have written a 'how to make piles of cash from social media' WSO and make the above paragraph into a 40 page pdf, but here, I am giving it for free... this is the ultimate formula for making tons of money! )

Anyways. I have another account where I have a laser targeted list of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, big shot bloggers, journalists, business/marketing authors (NY Times Best sellers) and other startup industry related folk. Quite a few of those follow me back. I @ them witty stuff all the time so their followers get interested and follow me. I don't follow their followers, they follow me.

Some of the famous authors I follow on Twitter respond to me most of the time (and their followers follow me as a result... I don't sit on Twitter all day following their followers like those Twitter spamming ebooks out there teach).

One Silicon Valley TV producer guy (who has extremely targeted, HUGE following of entrepreneurs and tech startup CEO's) also responds to me whenever I tweet to him. I follow his tweets and write constructive comments on his TV show's blog. When he needs ideas I supply ideas. He always tweets thanks to me. That got me a good number of startup founder/entrepreneur followers. If I had the time (or a cheapo ghost writer) to come up with something to sell them, I'd be raking in good cash right now.


Adding random followers (90% of which are very likely to be spam bots, not real people) and then blatantly spewing out spam, affiliate links and CPA offers is not going to make you a dime.

Try talking to real people and getting their attention by saying something useful for starters. You really need to take the time and talk to people. Ask them questions. Tell them something worth their time. Write stuff they would be interested in. Follow what they say and respond to them. Oh noes, that takes time and actually involves using your brain doesn't it! Sorry autopilot pipe dream chasers out there... There is actually WORK and BRAINS involved here. You need to come up with something useful to tweet.

You don't need to buy Twitter spamming manuals to teach you how to (not) make money on social media, just use your brains!

People don't seem to read their Tweets any more, at least replies don't come. So yep, it's changed. Too much junk, I think.


I know the Tweets that come right to me are always ads. Bummer Looking for interaction, not sales there.

Milli has facebook pages, she does talk to people (she answered my PM there a few times.....) I don't follow her on twitter so if she is a twitter spammer, shame on her.

Mark Anastasi is the example I should give, he always personally answers PM and gives away tons of good stuff to people.

As for Twitter: You can make tons of money, especially in offline biz. Twitter is great for intel gathering on offline prospects (and their competitors) people land all kinds of partnerships and business deals via Twitter.

Number of followers doesn't matter, it's the number of targeted followers that really matters. I got loads of regular blog readers via twitter.

Twitter is a tool for building relatinships and adding people to your sales funnel, not for directly selling stuff (unless you own a cafeteria and announce your come get your free coffee deal there)

Two words that will still make you money on twitter - post porn

As with all social networks Twitter is not for selling but for telling and for generating leads.

The whole "Twitter is dead" thing comes up over and over again, and it's just not true.

It's all in how you use it. Let me draw an analogy for you.

Say you stand in the middle of a crowd of 20,000 people and shout your offer out through a megaphone. How many takers do you think you'd get?

Probably a very small percentage right?

Now perhaps if the megaphone had only just been invented you might get a lot more interest just because of the newness and novelty.

That has been the case with Twitter in it's first period of existence. For a while people were very open to paying attention to lots of tweets because of the newness of it all.

But now people are very familiar with it and they know to filter through messages and hunt out the ones they actually want to read.

Back to the analogy: On the other hand, what would happen if you walked into a room of 200 people and personally introduced yourself to each of them one at a time, shaking their hand and pausing to have a brief conversation.

What if you then made an offer to the whole room? How many takers would you get then?

That's how Twitter works now. You don't get results from monumental numbers of followers. You get results from making people interested in your tweets.

Then when you do send out on offer you'll get a far greater response.

The reason why the response has reduced is because people have started following a lot of people and it has become hard to get their attention.

And to get attention, you should either have an irresistible offer or you should have a somewhat authority status or you should have a good relationship with your followers.

When done correctly, you can get very good results.

In short, twitter is NOT DEAD.

The mass proliferation of crazy Twitter automation tools mostly due to idiotic internet marketers is much to blame for why some of the clueless people in here think that 'Twitter is dead'. It all begins with following the right people - if all you're following are spam bots, do you really expect them to respond to ANY of your tweets or exhortations?

How do you do that? Simple. Visit their Twitter pages, get a feel for what they're saying and figure out if you want to be exposed to their tweets day in and day out. Are you getting any value from what they tweet about? If not, then do not follow them! Many of you are simply using mass automation tools to follow every Twitter account that matches certain criteria, but without actually taking the time to analyze the people you're following, you might as well be shooting in the dark. This above issue that I've elaborated on is the primary cause of your troubles with Twitter!

Once you've followed the right people, the next thing you need to do is build relationships with them. Interact with them and take the time to personally respond to tweets that interest you. Cut down your promotional tweets and stop blasting out your affiliate links non-stop. Instead, send them to your blog and/or capture page and overdeliver on giving them valuable information that they can actually use.

If you follow the golden rules above, you will find yourself with many targeted Twitter followers that you can monetize in several different ways...but you have to be patient and wait for the relationships and trust to develop. As several people have mentioned above, it's just like networking in a business meeting. You have to be personable, engaging and actually deliver value to the people you interact with before they'll pay any attention to what you're selling/promoting!

I have not made one single penny from Twitter. But then, I am not actually making any attempt to.

We use Twitter as a relationship tool - it's our warm fuzzy side as opposed to our dry IT geek side. Customers can 'spy' on us, check that we exist, see what we're interested in - it builds their confidence in us.

People who ARE trying to make money from Twitter tweet us ALL the time or DM us. We don't follow any of them up. WHY? Because that is how the dodgy Twitter guys get into your account and start sending Tweets under your username. It has happened to five of my followers in the last week alone.

Having that happen if you are a business could be very damaging.

The malicious spammers are reducing the chances for the genuine guys to even have their tweet read in full.

So, Twitter isn't DEAD but it is overloaded with people trying to sell and malicious spammers. Just as FaceBook had its high and is now just chocca with guff.

The next big thing will be along any minute.

Twitter is very responsive if you think like a human and not in marketing speak....you have to do it right.

Twitter is the fastest live research out there, you can build niche about niche from it but you have to put the effort in to your research up front and then build your twitter account like a human...

...and the number of followers is irrelevent....in fact 200 is better than 2000 as it looks more human...but its not about who is following you, its about finding people tweeting about your needing the solution your niche offers...

So if anyone say Twitter doest work, it just means they aint doing it right....

You only need perseverance to make TWITTER work for you.

Twitter still works! And you can earn good money with twitter.......

But,

At the moment,Twitter responses are very poor for internet marketing related offers such as eBooks "how to make money online", "make money with ClickBank........"

Reason,

He tries to sell you and vise versa......

If it's so,

Most other niches are working well with targeted followers.

I dont think you should see Twitter just as a money making exercise....I think its more a good way to test if a niche is responsive...you can just use bit.y and clickbank to put a site on your profile and them measure if its getting clicks....if you are getting clicks and then buy a domain and set up a squeeze page...if you aint getting nothing from it, move on your next niche and let that one rest in peace...

...saves a lot of time setting up a whole website to then discover no one gives a poop about what you have to say

twitter responses seem slow to me too...but as someone said it boils down to your targeted niche

So here is a question, I recently opened up a twitter account for each of my niches (non IM).

My plan is:
-schedule tips to go out every day
-each time I have a new article on my site, schedule it as a tweet with an interesting title (ex: the three top reasons your dog keeps barking) and a link to the article post
-on the BLOG page, in the sidebar there is a box to opt in to the list.

In my head this should work because it is 'selling without selling', but has anyone else done this? If so, has there been any luck?

As a few others here have already stated, the best response comes from sending people to something they would find interesting, informative, educational, funny, inspirational, motivational...Not Selling...at your blog.

Once they are at your site and have read or saw what they came to see, ask them to do something else (opt-in, check out a product, leave a comment...)

Leaving a comment at your blog is a deeper form of the relationship you started at Twitter.

The best response comes from building those relationships and the best relationships involve give and take.

If they leave a comment on my blog, I'll try to give them something like a 'shout out' or 'mention' to my followers which helps them build their list.

If someone retweets a message of mine with one of my links, I'll return the favor and tweet a message about their blog or whatever it is that they have.

I have found that Twitter and other Social Media sites are not as responsive when selling but work extremely well with the Law of Reciprocity.

If you go into it with an attitude of how to help someone else accomplish what they want you will get what you are looking for.

I pretty much agree with what Dr. Mani has
stated... it's about building relationships with
people.

Also, as to the responsiveness of Twitter in
terms of making money... I did make a sale
from a tweet I made when Twitter came out
not too long ago.

Now, in my opinion, the hype has gone and
people don't randomly click on links anymore.

I wrote something similar in my blog post:
Making Money on Twitter: The Truth Has Tweet | Asher Aw

Asher

I'd blame the current Tweet 'blindness' mostly on the automated Twitter tools that were all the rage last year and the year before it. I'm not saying that these tools are bad per se; used correctly they will really help in building up your followers while cutting down on the work you do. But if you abuse and misutilize them, you could alienate most if not all of your followers and this will make you a social outcast on Twitter.

I've had pretty good response rates with Twitter, but I added a little twist. I made it so people can interact with my website and get realtime responses via twitter. For example, I only let people comment on my blog via twitter.

I give a passcode for each post and tell readers they can reply to the post by tweeting <code> <comment>. It keeps the posts short and people get a kick out of it.

I do think spammers have practically ruined the invention of a good thing, but Twitter does help me connect with my target market online. I've met some really nice people and established some friendships. I do believe that is the main goal to achieve there.

Hey, did you see the news? Sort of off topic, but some people learn that if you tweet the wrong things on Twitter, it can cost you: Oklahoma receiver suspended for Twitter post – College Gridiron 365 Blog – Orlando Sentinel