Does Twitter Work For Marketing Your Business?

I’ve been on Twitter for several months now. And I must admit, Twitter is kind of an addition. I use Twhirl, a desktop application that allows me to see all the posts to my Twitter account as they happen.

But the question always remains, "Is this a useful tool, or a waste of my time?"

I’m also part of a beta social group Triiibes put out by Seth Godin. Inside the site you can create Triiibes of people, and one of the Triiibes I belong to is the Twitter group.

About a week ago we decided to run an experiment. If a group of people come together and use Twitter to try and increase traffic, what will happen? So everyone submitted their best blog post, one was chosen, and the experiment began.

The blog post was on net neutrality [which is worth reading/watching in itself if you have the time]. It was a new post, and had no traffic before the experiment. In the first day of the experiment, 50 tweets went out, causing 196 unique page views, with the average time spent on the page 3 minutes 20 seconds. Wow - very cool.

Traffic did drop off after that initial day’s spike, but it still isn’t back to zero.

There are a lot of different statistics/ideas related to this experiment that I won’t get into completely here. But the point I want to make is how the new social media sites can and do make a difference in your overall marketing campaign.

Imagine if you could write a blog post, send it through your various social channels, and have almost 200 people read your information - the first day you had it out online. What could that mean to your business?

Now imagine you have the ability to do this several times per week. Would you spend a couple of hours a week creating fresh content, and releasing it to your network - to have up to 1000 people read it and be exposed to your business ideas?