Twitter: Value or Waste of Time? - Uwe Hook

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Do you suck at Twitter?

There are many things I don't like about Twitter: the platitudes, the public handshaking and showboating, the Sisyphus-like race to follow and unfollow, just to follow again.

As an avid user of Twitter, the great outweighs the bad: The connections you develop over time, the amazing discovery of content and the immediacy of the platform.

You tweet too much. You don't tweet enough.

While Twitter is a new platform made for pull marketing, it still pays to apply the basics of push marketing: be consistent, be in the market and repeat your messages. I tend to tweet 20 times a day, 3-4 times pushing blog posts. It works: I see clicks on the blog throughout the day, some people are more inclined to read new content in the morning, and others are more interested late night. Add to it that almost 40% of my Twitter followers live outside the US and it becomes almost impossible to plan the perfect schedule for the audience.

One measure of success are the number of clicks to posted links and the amount of sharing in my social graph. The other impactful metric is the growth of a community: If you don't grow, you're destined to fail. Both measures of success tend to change the mindset of many people: They hunker down, tweet even more often, repeat their messages more often and be constantly around and in people's faces.

Should you be great on Twitter?

Repeating your tweets and being in the face of your followers constantly makes you great at Twitter. But, does it benefit your business? You can cram your feed with content all day long and get the most out of Twitter. How does this impact your business, the bottom line?

You have to make your own use case.

You're a fool if you want to be good at Twitter. You want to be good at your business. To be good at Twitter, you need tweet more, spend more time on the platform, be completely immersed. To utilize Twitter as tool for business success, you have to find a balance. Twitter is a great tool to connect, to find new opportunities, to showcase your thought leadership.

It's hard not to get sucked into the numbers game. It's easier when you remind yourself that most of the numbers are irrelevant. What's relevant what you get out of your Twitter presence. For some it's about numbers and shouting. For me it's about quality and sharing.

Twitter is what you make of it.

Uwe Hook is the CEO and Co-Founder of BatesHook, Inc. (www.bateshook.com) and a veteran of the advertising and marketing industry with the goal of building connections between people and brands. Uwe can be reached at uwe@bateshook.com.

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