Using Twitter for PR and Marketing (or valued conversation over empty followers)

You may have seen this site recently on how to use twitter for marketing and PR.

At vzaar we have been finding Twitter rather useful for marketing and some minor PR. Jamie (‘business guy’ on the blog), takes a bit of time each day to respond to people looking for video solutions and communicate with them. Sometimes this is one way, but it can also become the opening to a conversation which is the best way to find new users. Conversation, not broadcasting.

I’ve also noticed a lot more people following our @vzaar twitter feed in the sales space (i.e. online selling of something). What I find interesting is the average follower count of these people is normally in the 1K-10K range.

I find this curious. On my personal feed I tend to block most (not all) followers like this. I don’t want someone following me to boost my follow count, or because they expect me to follow them back. I want people following me who either actually know me, or want to follow me because they find me interesting. I would say I have probably an 80% hit rate of genuine followers out of my 250ish followers. On our work account I would say this hit rate is probably more like 20% out of the 200ish followers we have there.

But then in fairness, we follow 206 people, and we don’t read the stream of people we follow. We read the search stream and we follow our own personal streams, but we don’t follow the stream of who we follow, as we’re all just too busy, so we’re equally as bad.

I would love to reduce our work twitter stream to people we actually follow and read, but we all follow them on our personal accounts anyway. I think Twitter is splitting into two groups. Those who use them for personal conversations, and those who use them for work and/or to amass followers.

I think there is much more value in real links than the empty links you get when it’s a game and the winner is how many followers you get.

The coffee shop and restaurant above our office, just started a twitter feed. @thepantrylondon only has 14 followers. But all of those followers are valuable as they are all people who live or work nearby. I would rather have 14 valued followers than 10000 empty ones.

They don’t have to be the most followed coffee shop in the world. What they need is people who might by coffee from them, to have an interaction with them when they are not in the shop.

That’s how you use Twitter for PR and marketing.