If you’ve spent any time reading this blog, you know I haven’t exactly been jumping on the Twitter bandwagon. Especially not for building my online business. However, it’s always important to keep an open mind. No matter how I feel about Twitter, there are numerous credible and respected online marketers who – if they are to be believed – are using it to successfully grow their businesses.
That’ one of the reasons I let my WordPress developer talk me into setting up a Twitter account for UltimateFatBurner.com and integrate Twitter on the blog.
If you visit the blog, you’ll see how visitors can “retweet” posts to their own followers (new blog posts are automatically sent out as tweets) and are even encouraged to “follow us” with a slick Twitter “badge” that slides up and down the right-hand side of the page.
Cool, huh?
Yes, and practically useless for getting my site in front of more eyeballs. As you can see from the stats, we’ve accumulated 11 “followers” in the 8 or so weeks since we’ve made the implementation.
I can’t say this surprises me; Twitter is a social media tool, a tool for interacting. If I want to build a large list of followers, I need to follow other people, so that I can gain access to their followers and so on. Twitter is a not a medium to which you can sit back and broadcast your message. Nope, in order for you to use it effectively you need to use it the way it was meant to be used. And quite frankly, I have neither the time or the inclination for such an experiment.
That’s why I was intrigued to hear about a service called Twittollower. It was recommended to me by a Kevin Riley, a marketer I have found to be credible, so I decided to take a closer look at the service.
In essence, Twittollower builds your list of Twitter followers automatically – mostly by “following” credible Twitter authorities within your chosen niche or theme. Many of these people will “follow you back” to return the favor, and in turn, your exposure grows.
The bottom line simply is this; Twittollower guarantees you a minimum 2,000 new followers in your chosen niche each and every month for a cost of $99/month ($67/month for the first 200 participants). And they promise you’ll grow your follower list quickly – right from day 1.
I decided, “what the heck” and locked in at the $67 per month rate (depending on when you read this, there may still be spots open at this price). As I plunked down my credit card, I said to myself..
“At the very least, it will make an interesting Test Tube experiment for No BS Marketing.”
Getting set up is easy; it takes about 5 minutes, and that includes setting up a brand new Twitter account (unfortunately, it was not recommended to use any existing accounts, which is a drag considering I just had one set up a few months ago).
I completed the set up on January 22 (2010), and as you can see from the chart at TwitterCounter I have accumulated nearly 500 followers in just a couple of days…
Of course, this appears to be very impressive. It does, however, remind me a little bit of purchasing newsletter subscribers (from services like Glen Hopkins’ ListOpt) back in the early 2000’s. It’s all great to have zillions of newsletter subscribers, but it doesn’t do you any good if none of them are interested in your message, or even read your newsletter.
In other words, $67 or $99 is a great deal for 2,000 (or more) Twitter followers per month, but only if they are responsive to your message, your offerings, your content, and your theme. Although it’s early days indeed, Twittollower’s service certainly appears to deliver exactly what it promises. Whether or not these followers are targeted and responsive to my messages and actually help build my business is what I intend to determine with this Test Tube experiment.
Stay tuned.
I just stumbled on Twitollower and was considering a similar experiment. Very interested to hear the outcome, although I suspect that your Listopt analogy has hit the nail on the head.