Why I’m on Twitter and Why You Shouldn’t Bother

It’s been nearly a year since I started using Twitter and many people still ask me why I bother and what is the purpose of Tweeting and being on Twitter at all.

Interestingly I took a look at my current linkedin contacts, Facebook friends, and Twitter followers and found these statistics (as of today Feb 16th 2010):

  • I have 1097 LinkedIn contacts
  • I have 303 Facebook friends
  • I have 262 Twitter followers

Of the 1097 LinkedIn contacts 185 are also my friends on Facebook but only 45 are on Twitter

The fact that I have my most number of “contacts” through LinkedIn is no surprise because:

  1. LinkedIn has been around for much longer
  2. LinkedIn generally serves as a good network medium for finding jobs so people use LinkedIn more
  3. It’s an easier process to get people to “LinkIn” with you than it is to acquire Facebook friends. Many keep Facebook focused on personal friends and LinkedIn for business. It’s also relatively more difficult to get people to follow you in Twitter, unless you do the you follow me, I follow you thing

So what makes Twitter different from LinkedIn or Facebook?
Let’s take a look at a few more statistics, this time from my recent post MDM Landscape: Past, Present and Future. My blog analytics show that approximately 740+ people have read the post, of which 550 originated from Twitter. Either my original tweet or RT (ReTweet) from well followed and respected Tweeps like Merv Adrian, Rob Karel, Ray Wang, Jill Dyche and others have been driving the traffic. I can even compare the time of a RT with a sudden spike in traffic for the post. What this tells me is that despite the fact that I have much fewer Twitter followers than LinkedIn contacts, the quality and network of those followers once activated through a RT from them is extremely powerful. In this case quality over quantity for sure. More importantly, people who are coming to my blog from Twitter are people who don’t yet know anything about me and the readers come from all over the globe (see the geo-map above). Unlike Facebook or LinkedIn where they have had previous contact with and already know me, in marketing funnel-speak, these are net new suspects.

Update: My blog post Cloud Computing Fantasy Private Company Investing – Appirio, Aster Data, Cloudera, Voltage Security, Zuora is proving this even further. As of today 2/23/10 it has been RT over 10 times by fans of each company encouraging their followers to vote. The spike in traffic is phenominal with over 1000+ visitors today alone, making it the most popular post on my blog ever.  

So again you ask, why bother if you don’t have a blog and aren’t interested in networking and personal branding or finding a new job? Well you are reading this right now because you were curious about the heading of my post, whether you came from my LinkedIn status update, a Tweet, a RT or Facebook from me or someone you follow or trust. Therein lies the other benefit of Twitter which is much overlooked. Twitter provides a great variety of information in short digestible tweets which give you the option to dig further if you so choose. And again if you follow the right people, the content they provide can be very specific to what you are interested in. As such, it’s like having a personal concierge for information. Some agencies, news aggregators charge a pretty penny for this type of information filtering. Most of us are passive receivers of knowledge, like watching TV to be entertained for example. Twitter tunes you in for next to no effort on your part.

Finally, to close if you happen to be a marketing professional and you aren’t using Twitter, read this use case about how even if you don’t care what isn’t being said about you in Twitter, you should care and monitor Twitter as a medium upon which your company could be mentioned … and you should engage and know how to deal with it.

Given this you probably might have guessed by now that my post headline which said I really think you shouldn’t bother with Twitter was sarcastic in nature. For those of you who came through the Twitter link, sorry to have wasted your time as you probably already know all this. Thank you for reading this post and my other blog articles.

Maybe we should just keep it a secret and let’s NOT RT and/or pass this post URL on to your non-Twitter friends. After all I’m sure they don’t care if we outmarket them 🙂

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