I cancelled my Twittollower account this week.
Not sure why you should care?
Then you have probably missed my introductory Test Tube article on Twittollower, the service that builds your list of Twitter followers automatically (in my test tube articles, I put various tools/software/strategies to the test on my main web sites, and report the results to you!).
This service promises to add a minimum of 2,000 niche-targeted followers to your list each and every month. This, at an introductory cost of $67 per month, rising to $99/month after the first 200 participants.
I subscribed to the service to determine several things…
- Does the Twittollower service deliver the volume of followers that it claims?
- Do these followers appear to be niche-targeted as advertised?
- Do those followers respond to my “tweets”? Build my business? Deliver traffic in a cost effective means?
Once I got to playing around with the Twittollower service, Twitter, and “tweeting”, I quickly realized that it would be very difficult to assess the true value of the Twittollower service and make general, wide sweeping statements about its effectiveness/ineffectiveness based on my experiences.
In the lingo of my science-based supplement review site UltimateFatBurner.com, this is a “n=1″ experiment. These results may not be applicable to you – no more than the guru who is preselling the Twittollower service based on his/her own positive experiences. In other words, this is my UNIQUE experience and yours may be different – depending on your audience, its demographics, your offers, the effectiveness of your “call to actions”, your tweets, your niche, etc, etc.
Keep this in mind as you follow along with my experiences…
1) Does the Twittollower service deliver the volume of followers that it claims?
Absolutely. In the month I remained subscribed to the service, my brand new Twitter account obtained 2953 subscribers, and as you can see here, it has generated another 600 followers or so, in the few days since my cancellation…
2) Do these followers appear to be niche-targeted as advertised?
It’s almost impossible to tell.
Sometimes, the “twitter” handle is indicative that your new follower is targeted to your niche, but most of the time, it is not. For example some of my recent followers are “bitchogram”, “metroscreen” “hotelsreviewed”, “onlinesalsa”, “redhottips4u”, “janetjackson5″ and “beabillionaire”. Certainly nothing here to indicate these new followers are the slightest bit targeted to my niche.
At the same time, just because their Twitter handles are not indicative of that, doesn’t mean they do not have such an interest.
I can, however, attest that the Twittollower algorithym does have a glitch or two. I was none too pleased to find for instance, that I was “following” “yourdailyporn.”
Not only do I highly doubt that this “tweeter” is interested in what I have to offer, but who you follow is readily available for perusal by your audience on Twitter. Having porn related material in the list of people you follow is hardly what I would describe as a positive “brand building” exercise. It undermines your credibility and calls your integrity into question. I was lucky to catch this one, but since Twittollower generates so many leads, if you’re not actually checking each and every one of newly generated followers, some will slip by.
Not good.
3) Do those followers respond to my “tweets”? Build my business? Deliver traffic in a cost effective means?
This is probably a better measure of whether Twittollower delivers the targeted followers it promises. And since it was recommended to start a brand new Twitter account for use with the service, I was able to compare its performance against the already-established but rather pathetic account (28 followers as of today’s date) set up for UltimateFatBurner.com.
And the results? These two charts from Hootsuite tell the tale. First, the chart for the original UltimateFat account (click here to view full size image in a new window)…
And next, the chart for the brand new “dietpillguru” account (click here to view full size image in a new window)…
As you can see, over the same 30-day period, Tweets to the existing account received 65 clicks, while those sent to the new one generated a mere 84 clicks. Considering that the new account had 20 times the number of subscribers of the established one within a week of its inception (now a whopping 150 times as many!), this is hardly a rousing endorsement. It’s pretty pathetic, but it confirms what I suspected – real targeted followers are the ones who are “wowed” by your great content, products, services and so on, and sign up to receive your updates from your web site.
As you can see, this is neither an efficient nor a cost-effective way (about $0.80 per visitor to date) of driving traffic or building a business – at least, it certainly isn’t for me.
So why did the service fail so dismally for me?
From what I can tell, it could be any number of reasons…
My “tweets” weren’t compelling enough: At the beginning of this experiment, I read a lot of tweets to get a feel of what sort of material was flying around the “tweetosphere.”
In the end I settled on a blend of material that inspired curiosity (i.e. “It’s a bit hard to believe that Microsoft hates fat people…” “Are millions really wasting their time jogging?”, “Cheat your way thin? Really?”) or a deliberate “call to action” (i.e., “You HAVE to check out “The Ab System” if you’re looking to get lean, mean, and save big too!”, Download our newest publication “Dirty, Rotten Tricks; Supplement Company Lies That Cost You $$$” FREE:”).
Neither worked particularly well in generating interest with my followers.In most cases, I made a deliberate attempt to avoid making tweets that appeared as crass marketing messages, since many Twitter users find such things offensive.
I didn’t send enough tweets: Since I’m not an active Twitter user, I’m not really sure of the accepted protocol of tweeting. In other words, how many times will my followers tolerate a message for me in a day?
I experimented with 1-3 tweets per day; once in the morning, once at lunchtime, and once in the evening. As far as I could tell, the frequency of my tweets or the time of day they were sent made no difference at all.
I didn’t spend long enough establishing my credibility: At first I thought this might be an issue but then it dawned on me…”… how can I establish my credibility if people don’t take the time to follow up on the links included in my tweets?” I have yet to be convinced that one can build huge amounts of credibility 140 characters at a time. People need to go the extra step if they are to assess the value of your offerings. And if they don’t do that… you’re done.
The demographic of my followers is not ideal: Are the people using Twitter who are interested in my niche the same demographic as the visitors to my web site? I know that for the section on fat burners, the largest majority of visitors is middle-aged women.
Are my followers comprised mostly of middle-aged women? Somehow, I doubt it. Still, it hardly accounts for the fact that virtually none of my tweets received much of a response – even ones that elicit a natural curiousity (i.e., “It’s a bit hard to believe that Microsoft hates fat people…”)
My followers just weren’t all that interested in what I had to say: Ultimately, it occasionally comes down to this – sometimes, the people you are trying to reach really could care less. Perhaps I haven’t been doing anything wrong, and it’s a simple matter of the fact that my followers are not targeted, and therefore not interested.
By now, you’re beginning to see the problem; there are a LOT of variables which can be factored into the equation to account for the failure (or even its success for that matter) of both Twittollower and the use of Twitter as a marketing medium. While Twittollower certainly delivered on the number of followers it promised, how targeted they really are is difficult to assess with any real degree of accuracy. In my case, I have a hard time believing they were extremely targeted – my results give no indication of that at all. But I need to be fair.
Do I have other concerns about marketing with Twitter, and services like Twittollower in general?
You bet.
As services like Twittollower grow in popularity and marketing with Twitter becomes more prominent, the tweet “signal to noise ratio” is going to increase substantially. Even in this experiment, about a quarter to a third of the people I received Tweets from (usually as a result of being added to their follower list) sent some sort of marketing message. In other words, they were using Twitter to promote their own interests – just like I was – and were unlikely to be responsive to mine.
As this percentage grows, expect Twitter users to become less and less responsive to any marketing message of any sort. In other words, “tweets” originating from people outside an established network of friends, family and colleagues are likely to be viewed with great suspicion. My gut feeling therefore, is that there’s a very limited time line for effective Twitter marketing, even if your business seems perfectly positioned to benefit from it.
Secondly, isn’t Twitter largely something enjoyed with cell phones? How many people are able to browse a large text-based web site easily and effectively on a cell phone or PDA? Seems to me that if that’s the case, my business is definitely not ideally suited for a Twitter marketing strategy.
I had several goals as I embarked upon this quest. First, I wanted to continue to build the UltimateFatBurner.com brand, by driving new visitors to its high quality, researched content. Second, I wanted to increase revenue by sending visitors to reviews of affiliate products I recommend.
I was unsuccessful in both counts. However…
I suspect using Twitter as a marketing medium could be very effective, but I also suspect it depends on your offers, and more importantly, your demographic. If your business appeals to a young, hip, “permanently-attached-to-their-cellphones” audience, then using Twitter and (even Twittollower), might make sense to you.
At least for the time being.
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