Bleet

Bleet, bleet goes your phone. More tweets from Twitter users rushing in like sheep to the latest fashion fad. Tweets have now reached the same place that email used to be stuck in, you only use them to sell to other people and you severely limit incoming tweets because so many other people are using tweets to sell to you. Work on your information supply chain before resorting to Twitter.

There are already tons of add on software for email to filter what you receive. Many people have already gone through changes of email address to stop the junk. The same is appearing for tweets but tweets have two categories of junk.

Look at this

The first is advertising, the straight buy now sales pitch, plus the viral marketing junk where the sales pitch is made into something entertaining. Entertaining tweets are hard to make so the tweet devolves to a look at this and the this is the sales pitch, viral or otherwise.

Most look at this authors are poor at summarising the this within the limits of a tweet and that drops the tweet down to just another bleet we will ignore. Many of the this authors are really bad at setting up their Web sites which makes the creation of a good look at this tweet even more difficult. When you want effective tweet marketing, contact me before you pay someone to create either the this or the look at this.

Trivia

The next type of bleet is the trivia, something of interest to the sender but not to the recipient. Someone has a Web site where they provide solutions to really difficult questions, such as how to make good gluten free bread or anything about Java, and they end up with 800,000 subscribers to the tweets about additions to the site. Unfortunately in a lot of cases the tweets include the going to lunch style bleets. They might be of interest to the sender and two other people in the same building but not to the other 799,998 subscribers.

Unfortunately the limited data in a tweet conveys too little information to sort the useful from the bleets. Forcing people to use email is one way to make people think about what they are sending and provides room to include the information that helps us, or our filtering software, decide what is of use.

Mailing lists

You then have to organise your tweet sends in the same way as you organise sending email using categories, flags, mailing lists, what ever fits your approach to organising. You also have to fight to keep yourself off the tweet lists of those who target you as a victim of their marketing campaigns.

Noise level

Combining the trivia bleets with the marketing tweets, Twitter already has too high a noise level. Your tweets are bleets until you fix up everything that occurs before the tweet.

I see people labelling themselves as SEO specialists or Web designers then pushing twitter as a magic cure for your marketing problems, distracting you from the real work you need to do. Twitter is not a magic bullet. Tweets are just one way of using the result of the real work you do first before you call in the SEO and Web design people.

I could go through many examples of marketing people doing the wrong thing with Twitter because they did the wrong thing with the preceding technologies and nobody corrected their direction back then. In a lot of cases, doing something badly then paying a lot of money to do the something badly many times will end up producing sales for a while. AOL built a big business doing that in the 1990s then went bust because they ran out of suckers.

Conclusion

Forget twitter as something magic. Do the work up front to get your whole information supply chain working before approaching marketing, Web, or SEO people. Put tweets at the very end of your to-do list and do not worry if you never reach that action item.