If given the opportunity, one would be hard-pressed to find a marketing channel that evokes a more polarizing reaction among professional marketers than Twitter. People who get paid to market for a living (the ones with things like degrees or experience or both) are rarely in the middle on Twitter: they either love it, or they go to bed each night hoping social networking’s newest golden goose dies a violent and painful death. After writing a number of Twitter-related posts—and reading dozens of angry letters from professional Internet marketers—I have assembled a list of 17 reasons professional marketers hate Twitter. I hope you enjoy them.
1. Any Idiot Can Do It. And Any Idiot Does. If you selected ten “Twitter marketers” at random and followed the links back to their websites, you would no doubt be treated to a disturbing mix of ill-conceived designs, bad formatting, poor grammar, and instructional videos shot in dark basements—four things that would get real marketing people banned from the profession for life. Allowing anyone with an Internet connection to use Twitter for marketing purposes is like issuing driver’s licenses to 8-year olds.
2. Twitter Users Have Their Own Vocabulary—and It’s Annoying. Grown adults are typically resistant to things that require acting and communicating like a teenager, which makes Twitter and professional marketing people natural adversaries. Having to use terms like Tweeotches (Twitter bitches), Twarma (bad Twitter karma), Twitterrhea (excessive and unwanted Tweeting), Twitterectomy (cutting Twitter out of your life for a period of time) and Twitterbation (inadvertently Tweeting yourself) are immature enough, much less the 420 other teeth-grinding terms in the Twitter vocabulary.
3. Oprah and Ashton Like It. The interesting thing about marketing people, especially Internet ones, is they love to claim they knew about something before it was considered trendy by the mainstream. Internet marketers are the ones who like songs until they get radio play, drink micro-beers no one has ever heard of, and refuse to eat at chain restaurants. The bottom line? When Larry King starts Tweeting, it’s just not cool any more.
4. Pyramid Schemers and MLMers are Ruining it for Everyone Else. As of today I have just under 1,000 Twitter followers, and I follow about 1,050 people as well—the 1,000 people who follow me, and 50 bloggers and news organizations of my own choosing. With this in mind, as I look at my Twitter inbox I count 17 Tweets out of a possible 20 offering me either a) easy money, or b) thousands of Twitter followers in a short period of time. While Internet marketers try to run legitimate web sites designed to help companies grow, con artists and grifters make it nearly impossible for people to distinguish between our information and their spam.
5. Twitter’s Response Rates Make Direct Mail Look Interesting Again. Like many of you reading this post, I track and measure everything I do from a marketing perspective. Through my first 100 Tweets, my response rate is exactly .21%. As a warning, do NOT read this as 20%, or even 2% . . . this is TWO-TENTHS of one percent. Or to put it another way: for every 1,000 followers I have, exactly TWO click through whenever I post a new article. Two. To match an average direct email campaign my Twitter hit rate needs to increase by 10 times, and over 100 times to meet the performance of my newsletter.
6. From a Business Perspective, Twitter is Basically a Mall with No Customers. How much time would you need to come up with the name of just ONE company who set up a Twitter account for the purpose of buying things? A minute? More like a month. Among the millions of businesses on Twitter, one rule applies: everyone has an angle, and no one has any money.
7. No One Tweets Original Content. I realize stating “no one” writes original content for Twitter is a bit of an exaggeration, but anyone with a business-related Twitter account knows that 90% of the Tweets they receive are quotes from tip-a-day calendars, personal observations (”I like the color red. Do you?”) and re-reports of breaking (and not-so-breaking) news. On Twitter, writing from scratch is not just a lost art—it is frowned upon.
8. Twitter Users Have No Self-Discipline. Have you had your Twitter account for more than a week? Congratulations! You already have at least a dozen followers who send six Tweets in rapid succession multiple times per day, or send one Tweet every 20 minutes like clockwork. The attention-getting philosophy among businesses who use Twitter is straightforwardly annoying: create enough noise to be noticed above everyone else who is doing the same thing.
9. Everyone Follows Everyone. From an Internet marketing perspective, the biggest flaw in Twitter’s design is that in almost all cases, the only way to build a follower base is to follow others. And when the temptation to indiscriminately follow other people is too much to resist, the most important component of target marketing—demographics—gets flushed right down the toilet.
The Honorable Mentions: 10 thru 17
Before I wrote this post I asked some fellow Internet marketers to send me a few reasons they hate Twitter, and ended up with nearly 50. Below are a few of my favorites—some serious, some clever, and some painfully true.
10. It doesn’t have a three-letter acronym. Ha! (e.g. SEO, PPC, etc.).
11. Every time I see that blue bird, I want to hit it with my car.
12. Most of the people on Twitter are really ugly.
13. Too many add-on applets to maximize your experience, and I get confused very easily.
14. The hash tag search is full of spam.
15. I feel inadequate because I don’t have 5,000 followers.
16. Can’t tell if the girls are actually hot or not.
17. The dude that Tweets by farting into his office chair. Enough said.
If you are an Internet marketer and would like to offer your own reason for hating Twitter, please reply to this post and I will add it to the list above—along with your name (or Twitter username) and a link to your site or blog if you provide them.
Also, Diggs, Sphinns, Retweets or Stumbles are appreciated as well! Or, if social bookmarking isn’t your thing, please feel free to make a quick visit to one of our Google ad sponsors. Thank you.
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Author: Eric_Rudolf (68 Articles)
Eric Rudolf is Director of Marketing for one of the fastest-growing professional development and training companies in the world. Eric's work has been republished and Retweeted by The Rainmaker Report, The Social Media Guide, WhyPR, Elite Tech Jobs, Microsoft Small Business, and others. If every job paid the same, Eric would restore old houses or shoot pool for a living.
February 25th, 2010 at 11:24 pm
11-17 – funny.
March 24th, 2010 at 7:08 pm
Social comments and analytics for this post…
This post was mentioned on Twitter by TSCB: [ Monday Article ] 17 Great Reasons Professional Marketers Hate Twitter … http://tinyurl.com/lw2by9...
March 24th, 2010 at 11:04 pm
The ‘abundance’, ‘working from home’ gang drives me insane! # 4
March 25th, 2010 at 11:07 am
Johanna:
I sometimes wonder if we’d feel alone without them.
“If someone runs a pyramid scheme, and no one is around to Tweet about it, would it still lure in highly-impressionable people?”
Think about it
March 25th, 2010 at 4:44 pm
I feel for Numbers #’s 4, 5, 8, 9, 15.. Heck they all have a reason or two. I can’t stand meaningless people who follow you in order to receive a follow back… just to get spam to you.
Thanks for sharing!
March 25th, 2010 at 5:41 pm
Sabrina:
And thank you for commenting! Follow me, and I’ll follow you back
June 21st, 2010 at 8:26 pm
Fun, fun article, but I can’t disagree more.
Most of the the reasons above apply only if you’re indiscriminately following everything that moves. Following people is *not* the only way to gain Twitter followers – offering interesting content that people will want to follow and retweet, and building your reputation, are the more natural ways to grow your Twitter followers. In addition to getting more solid follower base, this will help you avoid spambots entirely.
One of the things I love about Twitter is that I can choose whose messages to see – I have about 4,000 followers, but follow only about 260 people on a daily basis, as I simply can’t ingest more information without it effecting my other work, and making my Twitter presence impersonal. (Twitter lists are a great way to categorize & reward other followers whose tweets I might not want to see every day, but feel are of value to me or my followers. So is an occasional retweet from a timeline of a new follower.)
Don’t like Twitter-talk? Simply don’t use it, and don’t follow others who do.
As for the conversion ratio, while we did not get too many direct sales, we did forge quite a few alliances, had made new friends in our industry, and have received a significant increase in traffic to our web site (which *is* our main goal). Direct mail and other marketing methods are a wrong model for social media. You can liken it much more accurately to a live cocktail party – you don’t make sales on the spot, but some of the business cards you doled out do eventually come back as customers.
Of course, it’s slower, and it actually takes time and effort – something that can get hard for a marketeer with many clients and products to sell. Alas, in social networking, there’s no shortcut to… socializing.
June 22nd, 2010 at 1:51 am
[...] just read a marketing blog article listing the many annoyances of advertising your brand or services on [...]
June 22nd, 2010 at 11:03 am
Hello . . . whoever you are. Next time you come back, feel free to share your name
You are correct in your assessment–this is a fun article, written (in Internet terms) a long time ago, when Twitter marketing and account management tools were MUCH less sophisticated than they are now. Obviously today, marketers have many more options for not only reaching people on Twitter, but filtering out those who are creating the most noise.
Thanks for writing!
- Eric -