I’ve been wondering lately on the value of Twitter. Initially of course, I was checking it out every day and making the occasional tweet. I’ve built up a few followers – how genuine these are I’m not sure. I only know a few of them personally, some have followed-back and others I have never heard off. I would have double the number of followers if I didn’t block half of them that requested a follow.
I’m fairly into this kind of social-networking kind of thing, but I have a real life too, and my business keeps me busy enough to not have time to keep tweeting, let alone visit my facebook account, LinkedIn homepage, Google profile or whatever. I even find it difficult to find time to write on my blog. So I’m just wondering what it’s all for. Is it just self-perpetuating? What I mean is, twitter and the like, not to mention the rest of the net, seem full of people claiming to help you promote your business on the internet. Like there’s a whole businesses built around making a business on the internet. Pyramid selling in some strange way.
I’m not saying its a bad thing though. I recently had wind of a local tender on twitter – didn’t get anywhere, but at least I heard about it.
And so to the reason for my blog today…
and why I will advocate Twitter at least for the time being… I use an online service called iContact.com for automating marketing emails (a thoroughly good service, by the way) and was due to spend some time working on a new campaign this afternoon, only to find that their website was down. A quick tweet on the subject and and auto-follow later, and I was given a temporary link by their Community Manager, so I could at least log onto their website while they sorted the technical difficulties out. Hopefully it will all be resolved soon and I can get back to working on my new campaign.
My point is, I wouldn’t have been given this link, and been able to do what I wanted to do on iContact, if it hadn’t been for Twitter – so perhaps this is a lesson that we can all learn from – use technology such as Twitter to add real value to your customer service like iContact have done rather than to tweet endlessly and meaninglessly about this link or that link, this photo or whatever.
Filed under: General Posts
