I am not here going to claim to be an expert, or even astute at either social networking or marketing - however I have some observations, and I thought I'd get them out there. If you have anything to add that would be great.
I'll start with:
When I first started trying to sell online I kept reading that twitter was the way forward. I love all things computery, so decided to join that weirdest of worlds that is twitter. I read that to be successful you needed to follow as many people as possible and to have a gadzillion followers yourself. So night after night, I would try and find relevant people I thought would be useful to follow, and strangely enough the oddest people started following me. It took a month or probably longer and I eventually had 690 followers, I was following about 450 or so. I would diligently tweet my new uploads and hey presto I would get an extra 30 odd 'views'. I quickly discovered these views were not real views but 'bot' views. (bot being short for robot) .
Slowly I realised what a bore it was just to see page after page of adverts for random garbage I wasn't interested in by people I didn't care about.
I read that you shouldn't just post links but comment and tweet interesting facts and that people would find you more interesting.
I did this, it made no difference, I was shouting in the wind, no one ever responded, they just posted their links and ran.
I went through and unfollowed those that look like obvious robots, still the same thing happened.
I left for a while, my followers went up, more random people followed, and then more marketing drivvle followed. I started to not particularly like it and only used it once in a while to post a link to get some views. No one liked me either ;-)
So, a couple of weeks ago, I lost it, and realised what a complete and utter waste of time it was and just unfollowed nearly 400. I now follow about 40. These 40 are people who have interacted with me or are friends. Suddenly I am enjoying it again, I post something, someone replies. I see posts that are fun or quirky or interesting.
I have to say in a year of having nearly 700 followers I never made a sale from it (as far as I know). I know many others have a different take, but I have honestly got very little except a tiny bit of fun from it. I have tweeted many times 'is there anyone out there?' and no-one responds.
I am sure if you are Calvin Klein or Victoria Beckham the world awaits your tweets, but if you are thinking that having hundreds of followers that you have never interacted with and who only ever post links is going to get you anywhere, then I wish you good luck. I suppose it's worth bearing in mind, how many of those links do you follow? if the answer is very few, then that is probably what will happen back unless you are very engaging.
So I read somewhere that if you go to a party and just go up to random people and say 'look this is my product' buy it, you'll become very unpopular very quickly. And it's pretty much the same. So, I have stopped looking at it as a way to sell or market my items (except rarely just to get bot views up) and have now decided to try and make connections with people.
Just my thoughts. And you? what have you found?
4 comments:
I've so far resisted Twitter, I like what you have to say and if I do join will certainly try not to get caught up in the mad scramble for followers at all costs!
Averil, it is certainly worth having an account, just be choosy. And also be careful of people who retweet all the time (unless its your tweets they are retweeting lol as you will start having that stuff clogg up as well. I have just had to get rid of a personal aquaintance for that reason, my entire feed was just his retweets.
This is food for thought. My twitter has become so full that I find it hard to follow a single topic. I'm not too keen on Facebook after a 'friend' put some unsavoury remarks in her comments about someone else! I really just use facebook/twitter to put my work out there - but spend much of my time on Folksy forum.
It's odd isn't it Tracey, you go along with it and then one day you think - what the.. what is all this stuff. I know I did.
I like facebook, to a certain extent. I use the delete function and don't show posts function as well if they are all full of garbage. I do think some people need to think about these things as a social thing rather than banging us all over the head all the time with selling.
As for someone saying something rubbish... it's the nature of the internet I suppose. I'm in the middle of writing up about facebook. There's just so much to write and no time to get it all down, and make and post and reply and and and lol
take care
Sue
Post a Comment