Twitter Marketing

The phenomenon of micro-blogging is synonymous with the website of Twitter. The strength of this social medium is in the enforced brevity of the messages (tweets) which concentrates the micro-blogger's writing mind to be utterly concise. Of course, the main beneficiaries of this type of service have been the celebrities and suchlike who already have a fan base to become followers of their twitter accounts. And of the celebrities, Stephen Fry is perhaps the most fanatical of twitter users. The concise and dry wit just keeps pouring out from his iphone on all subjects of day-to-day acting, technology, humorous asides and his beloved Norwich City.

But, we are thinking about the use of Twitter marketing for businesses and whether it is worth the time and money investment that a normal business can put into it. On the plus side, it is a free to use service for businesses (at the moment), so there are no direct costs there. The indirect costs are predominantly the time that it takes for us or our staff to be twittering (and perhaps the opportunity cost of not doing something else). This is where it gets a bit complex. From my research it seems to me that if you are going to do well from Twitter as a business, then you need to take it quite seriously, and to put in a fairly significant amount of effort into it. At least half an hour a day would really be required for the self-employed and micro-business to really get anywhere significant with Twitter. And that doesn't include the most important aspect of it, which is the direct communication that happens twitter marketing