Is Twitter Killing You

Firstly lets define “definition”; The dictionary describes it as something having “precise meaning” or “clarity”.

In marketing this is known as positioning or your “USP”, the thing that makes you different, the reason that customers buy from you, which I spoke about in my article on differentiation.

In community marketing or more specifically social marketing its the reason that people listen to or follow your blogs or other social media created by you.

However I see marketers destroying any positioning they may have by entering into the quantity versus quality game which is being amplified out of proportion using micro blogging sites like twitter.

So called marketers are abusing the system by creating a stack of content or “twitters” (gossip to the non twittered individuals out there) about all sorts of stuff that just isn’t relevant or related to any particular niche or market they may be representing.

This is a fatal mistake getting caught up in the need to twitter for the sake of twittering because everybody else is doing it, kind of like fashion trends which go in and out of favour and cost you a fortune to follow while leaving you looking questionably more fashion savvy lumbering you with a closet full of clothes that you won’t wear in a few months time and a large dent in your finances as you salivate until your next hit of fashion couture.

Twitter like all current modern communication technologies are marvellous pieces of marketing technology and if you have stacks of cash and are happy to play the “dumb” brute force game you can gain some advantages but they will be short and sweet and will cost you a pretty penny.

For those of you who are smarter, costs can be kept down and more value delivered by keeping your blog, networking, twittering or any other communications relevant to your specialism and you can build a very valuable commodity indeed in the process.

One of the things you can do to leverage these technologies and not lose your positioning and audiences interest is to run separate sites, social media (such as bookmarking, squidoo pages, hub pages etc.) and twitter accounts focused on each niche you are building. This social network then wraps around the “theme” you are working on using carefully selected content based on SEO and market research which gives potential visitors another layer of flavour to taste before reaching the centre of your marketing gob stopper.

To do this personally I have to manage a lot of accounts, user names and passwords which I just could not do manually so I use a tool called Roboform. There are other free tools some built into IE and FF or Flock but they just don’t give me the flexibility and speed that Roboform does.
I can access a site within seconds, pre-fill a form and have my new content added fast.

This setup will allows you to keep your gossip network relevant to your sites and other content and the audience will know who you are and what you stand for which is ultimtely the reason why the will become a follower or not.

So if you spot (or you are) a dumb marketer, the sort that has a lot to say about a lot of stuff none of which is really focused on anything or of any use or help, then leave them a comment and point them to www.marketing-definition.com