Twitter does have a potential but one has to work at it much harder than it is made out to be. Then it is a question of whether you really want to put all that time and energy into it.

I have decided not to give up so easily but I have also lowered my expectations. After some time I’ll revisit the subject in another post to give it a second and more qualified look.

Vance

Thank you for your comprehensive comment and welcome to my blog.

You have taken the time to read the other comments which is good. I really do not want to write off twitter completely but what you say kind of confirms my own perception of it’s true ROI.

I see some people tweeting almost every hour, most likely through some automation device or else they’d be spending most of their time on twitter.

The other problem is that most people on twitter aren’t paying much attention to the tweets of other people. I certainly don’t read every tweet. Maybe one out of a hundred. I simply can’t believe that people with tens of thousands of followers who follow a similar number of people read even 1% of the tweets they pretend they follow.

A few people that commented on this post seem to have good results with twitter and they most certainly spend more time on it than me. But it goes all back to evaluating how much time you need to spend on twitter to get good results and whether those results are worth the time spent.

Vance

Social media has worked for me in the past. Before the age of Twitter, an article I posted on another of my sites was stumbled by several people via StumbleUpon. It happened to get randomly chosen as a feature for a hour or so on the home page of SU and ever since that incident it has been coming up on page 1 of Google for the chosen keyword and usually at position #2, occasionally #1.

When Twitter arose I played with it a bit (yeah, no real statistics sorry) and will say that I am not impressed. A few of the comments above mention the subject line and the niche/topic being blogged about need to fit with the Twitter crowd (not in those words, but close enough).

That is what I found. Many of the likely readers of blogs like ours are online reading longer articles and searching for more “stable” content, than they will find in Tweets. Sure, some tweets may lead the occasional visitor here, such as Fazreen, but from a return on investment angle, the hours invested in following, tweeting, re-tweeting, un-following, and so on, have to equate to $$ in the bank back here on the blog or it’s just not worth it.

With anything in my business I apply the 80/20 rule. If 20% of the work gets 80% of the results that is where I spend my time. Tweeting, in my opinion, sits among the 80%, meaning it takes 4 times as long to get 1/4 of the benefit – a 1/16 ratio. Not a good return ratio.

That’s my 2c worth – Michael
.-= Michael Pedzotti@Plan your internet business´s last blog ..10 Steps to Internet Business Success =-.

There seems to be very little interaction among twitter users from what I’ve seen no matter which niche. Kind of like almost everybody promoting themselves and doing very little else.

Today I noticed one person promoting their different videos every few minutes with very little or no response.

Then you have the automated tweets like quoting what other people have said. Does anybody seriously read that anymore since so many people are doing it?

Anyway I’m still exploring this twitter thing and with mixed feelings to be sure. There is definitely some good and a lot of chaff.

I’m not sure about the time that would be reasonably worth it to spend on twitter. But communicating by @ and DM is good with those who interact with you I suppose. Do you use anything like HootSuite or TweetDack?

I saw a video about iPad recently and they have an app for twitter too. Joel Comm is using it now.

As for branding yourself with twitter I don’t really know how that would work. It would require a lot of time I suppose which most people including me don’t have. I read a blog post recently where a poll or survey was conducted of small business owners and big too I guess and I think about 20% of them outsource this sort of thing.

Vance

Thanks for the visit and comment. I have noticed that you tweet quite often and regularly. I have only recently found out about Hootsuite and will have to learn how to use it.

I’ll post about any significant progress in getting blog traffic from twitter. Comments about success with twitter like yours are a great help to me in not abandoning twitter altogether.

I appreciate every one of them.

Vance