A few years ago, it was tough to brush off the buzz online about Twitter marketing tools. It was thought that Twitter was one of the best ways to build a list and to get folks to buy the products you are advertising. Cutting through the hype, just what sort of results can you look forward to after using these Twitter marketing tools? Exactly how good is Twitter marketing? This article will examine the case for becoming involved and to see if it will actually repay your time and effort.
Anxious to increase my product sales, I went ahead and started Twitter marketing to grow a large list of followers hoping to turn them into purchasers. I ended up paying for and joining programs that would get me followers and programs that would basically promote my products for me. All in all, I think I bought about 8 software programs to help with my Twitter marketing adventure.
One of these programs was an automatic ‘people follower’ on Twitter with the objective that some of those people would follow me back. Next there was the Twitter marketing tool that would un-follow individuals who were not following me. This way I could be following Twitter users who might follow me back. Amongst other software I bought, there was one program which automatically tweeted a blog post just as soon as it was posted to my blog. In the beginning, I was really pleased with the end results after using the programs in combination as they actually delivered on what they promised. I was rapidly brought down to earth when I looked at my spreadsheet and saw that I wasn’t actually generating any money! I would post to my blog 10 times each day and those posts would be shown directly on Twitter just like they should. Then I discovered a way to have all the blog entries done for me automatically, thinking that the more posts I would have the more folks who would see them.
So permit me to reveal to you my results. Employing this strategy over three years led to almost 10,000 people following me on Twitter. You may think this is an amazing number, but let’s go a bit further: Also in the past three years I have had at least 15,000 of my blog posts that were promoting affiliate products posted to my Twitter account. My blog posts displaying on Twitter was the only kind of advertising for that blog I did and to test the effectiveness of Twitter I did not even ping new posts as they were published. Just how ‘good’ it was rapidly became plain: after 3 years only two affiliate sales made me $46.74 plus a further $9.10 for Adsense. With just 2 – 4 visits per day coming from Twitter, maybe this is not surprising.
Despite me employing tools to make the job easier and gaining nearly 10,000 followers on Twitter, I still could not turn a realistic profit using Twitter marketing for my blog. The bottom line is that the money I’ve made is not sufficient to cover the cost of the Twitter tools I purchased to start with. So from my perspective, though there may be good ways to advertise on Twitter, investing in the automatic softwares are not the way to go.
