Is Twitter worth my time?

I just use twitter.com to promote each new website pages, it helps them get indexed faster. Besides the extra backlink, traffic not much but I haven't spent much time studying it so it maybe good.

I have never got any visit on my website even if I promoted a few articles to all my followers ( over 100 I think )

It also matters the headlines you use. They have to be catchy.
Also don't make it more than 8 words long because if people like it, they will want to re-tweet it so a longer headline won't fit inside the allowed number of characters.

I have close to 10,000 followers on twitter on one specific niche and it's conversion rate is extremely low compared to other social media. But it's a good way to shoot the breeze.

hum i guess it depends on what you want to do with twitter, there's a lot of twam on it, so you need to have engaging posts, build a good following, and share and give before asking for more

You will have people tell you that Twitter is a waste of time, and some who will tell you to create one. But at the end of the day, it's your choice. It never harmed anyone to test it out. Because you may benefit from it, while others may not.

My personal experience with twitter, I found it not to be as effective as I imagined it would be. It really depends on what your promoting through twitter. If its an affiliate offer, then no. It's definitely a waste of time. Their are probably a hundred thousand people promoting the same things you are.

But if you are looking to brand yourself, then YES! It's a great social media website. I use it to connect with friends, and JV Partners. But NOT for promoting offers, or anything.

Hi Charlotte,

Twitter can be effective. I have gotten good business from "Tweetups" - local meetings of Twitter users.

I use Hootsuite to manage my Twitter feeds and really love it.

I believe it does help me. Not sure in your area. Basically, it is great for gaining exposure. However, not that great at conversions. Please understand the value of your keywords and # hash tags when starting a new campaign. Mostly, the key is to gain more exposure. That will lead people to linking to you. OK, those links in turn will make your pages rank higher in the search engines.

Twitter can be a time sucking vampire from hell if you don't manage it well, but it's proven to be one of the most effective brand building channels I've ever worked with. If you thrive on building relationships and networking, then Twitter can help you build your brand and drive traffic.

Find the communities (# channel) you want to reach out to and get involved by curating information and interacting. At least one study has suggested that the optimum balance is to curate up to 40 percent of other people's content.

Follower numbers are not a priority with me. I'm not saying you shouldn't try to build that number, but it is over rated. In most cases, even those with larger followings only really engage a small percentage consistently. I focus on getting people's attention and driving traffic.

Regards,
jim

Twitter is a really useful networking tool when used correctly, personally, I don't use any software, apart from hootsuite, if I need to manage multiple accounts. Make sure you communicate with the right type of people, Twitter is not about having huge numbers of followers, it is about connecting, listening and helping. I do know of people who have created their brand, by just using Twitter!

twitter and facebook are both worth the effort and time!

I have used TweetAttacks to automate the process of adding followers. I have posted about 50 different tweets over the past 3 months.....traffic to my site ....0....

It is worth it but don't expect direct traffic from people you don't know and have no relationship with.

It can be if you are trying to draw a straight line between tweets and traffic, although some very top level bloggers out there will tell you it's a big traffic driver for them.

For example, Ken Magill (an email marketing analyst) swears by the numbers he drives to his blog via twitter.

I've read quite a bit lately of formulas and tactics and they all seem to vary quite a bit, even in results as reported. As with any social channel/setting, there are some basic rules and dos and don'ts, but because it's basically human networking, I feel it's a much softer science.

I do think that you have to integrate your channels. Think of your blog/site as the hub of a wheel, the people you want to reach are on the rim and the spokes are the channels they may choose to use to interact with you. So, you have to provide the functionality in your newsletter so people can easily share your content via multiple channels and you have to promote your presence on those same channels.

Your ESP should provide tools and functionality to provide for this kind of sharing.

More than one person here has stressed that relationships are key on Twitter and they're right. IMHO, thank goodness for that! The more we focus on relationships, the better.

Myself, I don't sweat the stats so much. I just happen to enjoy the interactions and networking which Twitter facilitates so well.

Regards,
Jim

I have to disagree with everyone who says Twitter is junk traffic. Ive been using Tweet Attacks PRO to do my Twitter campaigns for like 2 years now, and it works great. Otherwise I would have dumped it LONG ago.

But your results will depend on a lot of things. Your tweets, how often you are promoting a link, making sure your "normal tweets" are relevant to whatever you are promoting.. I mean there is a ton of variables to take into consideration.

If you have the time and patience to learn the software, its literally the best Twitter marketing tool you can get.

However keep in mind that it can only do what YOU set it up to do. It takes a lot of getting used to. One hell of a learning curve. lol

Everyone thinks the Wait & Reply module is the best way to use it when they first buy, but to be honest I dont even mess with that module. Its so easy for Twitter mods to detect. Personally, I like the retweet attacks module.

Say you have 11 accounts - 1 is your main account, and the remaining 10 have 5,000 TARGETED followers. With retweet attacks, you can tweet your link from your main account, then the remaining 10 will retweet it to their followers - INSTANTLY promoting your link to 50,000 TARGETED users with the push of a button.

And thats just one of the things it can do.. lol feel free to check my classified, plenty of REAL buyer reviews. As you probably know from my posts, I'm not with that "fake testimonial" BS.

I'd rather be up-front about something and lose a potential customer than have someone purchase under false pretenses, then get mad when its not what they were expecting. Honesty is the best policy, doesnt matter if its on or offline.

You can also search on google, yahoo, whatever you want.. lol you wont find a single bad review of the software.

OR hit me up on Skype, I'd be glad to give you a demonstration if you like.

It depends on what demographics of traffic are worthwhile for your business.

For me, it wouldn't be, because that isn't the traffic I need for any parts of my business at all: "social traffic" isn't targeted enough to be of any interest to me. I don't want to have to persuade people to be interested in what I'm promoting, when I can more easily attract people who are already looking for it.

But apparently this isn't true for everyone.

I have negative experience with twitter. I try many different tactics for driving traffic from Twitter, but it's just too much time and effort for little results. It's better to invest that time and energy on something more productive.

I'm not a big fan of it. I see very low conversion rates from my Twitter followers. It has a lot to do with their mindset. They aren't looking for anything to buy, and twitter is a form of interruption marketing.

I prefer to cater to users/surfers that are already looking for me! Better ROI for my time.

Twitter is a great way to market to your regular clients. When you provide them with good value and invite their feedback, you will be more effective selling to them. To get new clients, a good way would be to pay someone with existing followers in your specific niche, make a landing page, and pay for a tweet to gain traffic to your website. This method generally produces a good viral effect when you offer something for free, like quality information or a product. Track your tweet campaigns until you find what works best for you.

There are so many ways to automate content and activity on Twitter that it doesn't at all have to be a time suck, as many have suggested it is. For the small amount of time I spend tweaking and maintaining things, the return is quite good.

My Opinion? Very little is worth doing if you aren't doing it right.

I personally use BufferApp to tweet everything. I find it works nicely and also gives analytics as well.

Social media networks do different roles for users. It would of course depend on your intentions. Are you using Twitter to make friends and enlarge your network? or are you using it for business? If you're main goal is to find people of the same interest as yours regarding business, you better put up a LinkedIN account. But if you're looking for friends, stay foot.

The thing with a twitter account is that to make it worth your time, you have to make it all about your time. That's why people outsource its maintenance. Successful results won't come from an idle account, and success in other parts of business won't come from a twitter addict.

Yes, definitely worth your time. More users are active in twitter now rather than facebook.

who has a twitter which is retweeted by others over 10, 000 people?

It would make sense that conversion would be low for twitter. But when you really think about it, twitter is the absolute perfect marketing tool. It's just a series of slogans and branding lines.

Just spend an hour a day tweeting some stuff and keep the identity consistent, you should see results after a while.

IMO, and other marketers may disagree, none of the social sites (with the exception of YouTube) are worth bothering with. It's a lot of work, an din my experience, you never get out what you put into them. I only use 3 main mehtods of traffic generation, and I have quite a successful business. They are:

1. List swaps/solo ads
2. YouTube
3. PPC

Yes, there are tons of other traffic mehtods, and I've probably tried them all, but I found that in order to make a profit as a "one man show", I needed to pick the three that produced for me and just scale them up.

Article marketing used to be good, but that's practically worthless now (again, some may disagree). Another thing that can work well if done right is forums. However, I just don't have time to do a ton of posting.

I think one of the main reasons that many marketers fail is because they get overwhelmed trying to do too many things. Just pick 2 or 3 traffic methods and work them. I wouldn't recommend that Twitter be one of those methods, however.

If you want to outsource, then social media could be profitable, but if you were to do it all yourself, I don't see the reward equaling the workload.

You just have to create a tweet that would catch the attention of other members and yes, twitter is worth your time.

Here's my take on it.

If you're going their for the sole purpose of getting traffic to your sites then I wouldn't bother. But if you enjoy participating and socialising with the Twitter community, I really think it can open new business ventures and networking possiblities.

Me personally, I went their for the sole purpose to drive traffic to my sites and as a result... Failed. But I hear all the time on this forum how it's open new doors for people etc.

Twitter isn't for me, so I don't implement it in my marketing.

James Scholes

Yes. If you set up Feedburner to autopost from your blog to Twitter then you will get indexed v v quickly. It definitely is worth it.

Use a twitter tool like TweetTank to build a few accounts with 1000+ followers.

I think it depends on what your business model is and what you want to "get out" of Twitter.

For many of my sites which are microniche blogs, there would be no benefit but for the sites that I want to become an authority in I think it is well worth the effort. As stated above you have to participate in the community and build relationships.

I've used Twitter for a long time, but previously only "announced" my new products for sale. For the past month though, I have been on there tweeting cool stuff, retweeting other peoples cool stuff and trying to connect with people and I have a seen a bit of traffic flow to my site (no idea if this translated to sales but probably not yet).

One thing that I didn't see mentioned is that I am getting a lot of value from reading the Tweets of people I am following. It's a great way to find out about the latest news and happenings in your niche and I've gotten a ton of ideas on articles and products just from looking at other peoples tweets.

Lee

Twitter is a lot more useful if you use it to develop relationships ... network. Just acquiring a bunch of followers and tweeting out commercial messages is not very effective for most.

On my opinion, every site that I want to promote or even monetize should have its own Twitter and Facebook. Although I just not used it in massive way, at least I already own it, if it worthy then I will utilize it.

Twitter can be hugely useful if you use it right.

I myself have dozens of twitter accounts - some are autotweeting, others I use to say 'hi'!, still others are used to promote affiliate products, etc.etc.etc.

You can also use Twitter for SEO:

10 Tips to Improve Your SEO Using*Twitter | Search Engine Journal

How To Use Twitter for SEO | SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

Kurt had a grand WSO out about it:

http://www.warriorforum.com/warrior-...uaranteed.html

He's quite brilliant about stuff like this....definitely worth looking into.

Hope that helps!

I think nowadays social networking sites are really good for marketing but do not waste alot of time on them as they can waste your time.

You can use tools to help minimize the time you spend tweeting. I have found Twitter useful.

People says that Twitter is good and a string tool. But even after having thousands of followers there is no traffic at all from Twitter. I think Twitter has been the most superstitious marketing tool ever, people had been having this superstition that Twitter works good for business and traffic but many of them end up disappointed.

Twitter is good for branding, getting to early adopters... If you do it right, bring a LOT of value to your followers, it can be great source of traffic/sales too. But if you use it to just post feeds from your blog or spam with commercial messages... don't expect much. You need to get involved.

From my experience on Twitter, it's just loaded with businesses trying to sell to businesses. People spend all day trying to get followers and you find that everyone of them is a company that wants to sell you something or another bloody IM'er!! I don't think it is a very good tool for making money.

However, it is an excellent tool to keep up to date with the latest innovations, products, events etc that are happening in your niche and being one step ahead of the competition.

If you know how to utilize twitter it is definitely worth the time.

I've seen a lot of support desks use twitter as a communication platform which is very cool.

Personally, I haven't done much with twitter but I would use it as an alternative commenting system for blog - i.e. rather than just automatically announcing a new blog post, use it to start a discussion on a post.

My feelings on Twitter are mixed. Really depends on what you are promoting.

Over time the power of Twitter marketing has gone down; however, you can still generate a lot of traffic with it.

The key to a successful Twitter campaign is not just size of your follower count, but the quality of your followers. Many people forget about that part and just start adding tons of people and get zero results.

Invest time into building your follower list. Use tools like Twello to search through categories of interests. Only add people with interests in your niche. Before you follow anyone (unless they are already following you), check out their profile. Do they have a zillion followers but only follow 20 people? No good. If there is a good balance between their followers and who they follow, chances are they will follow you back.

Look at the content and tweets they put out. Is it all just mindless advertising or do they only post content of value? How many tweets have they tweeted?

By hand selecting who you follow and who follows you will increase your chances of success 3-fold. It takes more time but it's worth it. If you build a larger audience with this method, you will not regret it.

Well you know where to get the best deal whenever you decide to check it out!

Plus TA has socialoomph integration, so I'm sure you would probably love it.

I've never even looked at socialoomph before, never needed to.. So I'm not really sure what they do or what they are about.

All I know is that TA does have it as one of their options.. lol

Hi yes twitter is definately usefull,50% of my traffic comes from twitter and I am on page 1 for tutoring even though my blog is only 19 days old,so I am very pleased with the twitter effect on my blog.Worth doing I think
Regards
vivi62

I would say for me (in my own opinion) twitter is worth my time since I can drive huge traffic from social activity. It is better to have a lot of followers first and have reliable and catchy tweets in order to experience a demanding sales on your business.

For my scheduled tweets I'm using hootsuite and tweetdeck. I find these two tools to be very effective and easy to use.

Aside from the high quality backlink... Twitter (for me personally) has proven to be a huge time waster. I have used software and gone about it the manual way and either way was a waste of my time. Just my 2 cents.

You are FAR better off learning how to use Facebook if social media is going to be your focus.

Depends on how much your time is worth, I recommend you use it however you see fit. You can either build relationships and get to know your followers or you can use it as a 1 way bookmarking tool. If you decide on the latter i'd suggest you look at automating your account in some way, there are plenty of companies/ software that allow you to do this.

So you can automatically follow users back, sends a thank you message (link to your site/facebook or whatever) and can schedule tweets to happen once a day once an hour or whatever you want.

In my oppinion Twitter is definitely worth at least some time, just not a majority of it.