COMMENTS
Well, the first question is - do you even want the Twitter lifestyle, right? I have seen very very few businesses get anything meaningful out of Twittering. In fact, what are we supposed to get??
This all totally makes sense. It took a little while for me to find my "true voice" on Twitter but as you say "Everything in its due time".
Also, I can't understand how people with 1000's upon 1000's of followers can properly engage in relationships?
We are taking it slowly and building our following one step at a time whilst using brilliant tools like HubSpots Twitter Grader to monitor our progress.
LOL. I dont think TBL creates a false hope, rather it provides a championing of the human spirit. I think most people know that the contestants dont have the added stress of family, home life and work not to mention helpful trainers and meals that are planned and closely monitored.
Perhaps its that TBL shows us what can be done with fierce determination, hard work with everything else being put on hold/conditions being prime. Apply this to your Twitter strategy and understand that if Tweeting was all that you did, your content was continuously relevant and people understood and engaged with your comments, then yes, you too can have 1 million followers in 6 months. Without surgery. :)
@jesskry
The beauty of twitter is not the 60% of people who try it and bail, it is the 40% of people who follow it incessently. Twitter is real time search, you tell people what you want and you can get 20 relevent responses. It isn't for everyone - but few products resonate with 100% of users. Not using social media and twitter to drive leads in 2009 is a grave error, like not SEO optimizing your site in 2003
People often have pretty unrealistic expectations when it comes to the number of twitter followers.
I think a legion of "social media experts" should take the blame for this. You know what I'm talking about, right?
Most of the people you see that have
thousands of followers also have exactly the same or even
bigger number of people they follow.
They use auto following scripts and services and hope people will follow back. They then discard people that didn't follow them back after a certain amount of time (at least smart guys among them do that).
You don't need this kind of followers. I've been retweeted lots of times by "social meadia experts" with tens of thousands of followers and I get more traffic from a typical "few hundred followers" user.
The followers they have are just an illusion, bots and people like them, following thousands of people and just not caring about their twitter stream.
I have to say this is probably my favorite post to date. I first joined Twitter because I felt I had to, and at that point only put half a heart into it. I gathered up some followers and built a few meaningful relationships. The more serious I got about it, and the more I truly enjoyed my Twitter relationship, the more I wanted more.
My focus now for Tweeting is not the number of followers I have, but the number of relationships I build.
As for the weight loss - I carried around an extra 45 pounds for about 8 years after having 2 kids back to back. Even though I wanted to lose the weight, I didn't lose it until I wanted to make it happen. And that did not come from tweeting and a tv show, it came from 5 days a week at the gym and a change in eating habits.
Great post. Thanks! :)
With everyone trying to teach you how to get hundreds of followers overnight, how to auto-follow, pre-write, pseudo-engage, “hire” bots this is a great thing to hear:)
And we couldn't agree more.
This article provides great encouragement to those who are discouraged. The key for most of my clients, and it is echoed here by the author and other comments, is that there must be a purpose and a realistic expectation set. Also, most forget to tie their Twitter (and other media) efforts into the activities they already planned in the marketing efforts and marketing plan/calendar. Tweet with purpose and to support your plan!
By the way, the posting was interesting; and frankly, I liked your highly-identifiable analogy.
I think many Twitter newbies quit because of frustration with twitter.com, its lack of features and poor user interface. For instance, how do you teach a newbie how to RT something on twitter.com and then still try to convince them that using Twitter is quick and easy?
"Ok, you're going to copy and paste the tweet into the 'What are you doing?' box. Then go the beginning of the tweet, type 'RT', hit space, put an @ symbol followed by the person's Twitter handle, put a colon or something between their handle and the tweet, then you can add your own comment at the beginning or end. Easy, huh?"
"I quit."
"Yeah that's what I thought."
I think it is terribly easily to get carried away in Twtter and lose perspective of the original reasons for being present in Twitter in the first place.
I believe a strategic and selective policy is important to counteract the negative effects of this phenomenon.
Twitter is one of those unique things that fits differently into any business or social effort. If you have the patience to try different things and aren't afraid to screw it up now and again, Twitter can work!
This post was great to read. Some of my restaurant clients hear about how great twitter is and expect to see instant results and tons of followers. The truth is - it takes work - you can't just set it and forget it. You have to tend to it everyday, be authentic and add value - It was nice to hear you acknowledge that "it takes time".
Many of our clients have seen all the hype regarding twitter and feel they are missing an opportunity. We find that they just don't realize that like Mary says, you can't just forget about it...you have to invest time and intelligence in most cases to make it pay off.
Interesting article/comparison and some relevant points for discussion. also, liked most of the comments. For me, I agree that (as a BL watcher) most everyone understands the difference between the TV show and reality (or should :). Your point that it's a lifestyle and needs to be taken in healthy doses IS true. And, therefore, also applies to using Twitter. Like everything else in life, moderation, patience and persistence are keys to success in the long term. For that matter, same holds true in the stock market, at least that's what I learned in economics ;)
I don't use Twitter as much as I did in the beginning. I have a pretty good number of relevant followers/followees, but, I have had a lot of SPAM type followers that have just kind of turned me off. TweetDeck has helped me deal with this situation and I enjoy Twitter more since I have started using TweetDeck.
I do agree with you that you should use it because you enjoy it. But for those that do want to promote products you can get followers by following others with automated programs like http://twittgeek.com or get thousands to follow you buy getting messages retweeted at http://retweet.it The simple programs are very powerful for promoters and just takes a little of the work out of the process.