follow or nofollow

When marketing your business, you have to consider all the possible avenues that suit your business needs and ensure maximum brand exposure. Specifically with online media, everything happens so quickly, that once you've orientated yourself with a popular social media site, another one pops up. Most web agencies feel the need to incorporate every new social media site into their marketing strategy, so as to give their business credibility. (We're on every platform so we must be cutting-edge)

So the other day I was having a conversation about twitter, and whether we should be using it as a marketing tool.Twitter is not as popular in South Africa as it is worldwide, but it definitely is catching on. I had a few thoughts about it.



Firstly the cons, how much are we actually going to gain from using it. If it's to be used as a marketing tool, and so few people are using twitter in SA, then how many potential clients are we actually going to reach. With every new marketing tool that you use, you have to maintain it, and that means, regular daily 'tweets'. And then, doesn't it just become another tool for shameless plugging and links. Should we just be following the pack because its "so hot right now" or should we try to gauge how suitable this marketing tool is for our business.

On the other hand, twitter is an exceptional tool. Besides being a social networking and micro-blogging tool, it's also a search engine. It's also a great market research tool. You can see if and how often people are talking about your company, brand, products, trends (i.e great for reputation management). In addition, you can keep up to date with the latest news, and the part I love best, follow your favourite personalities.

Maybe I've only begun to scratch the surface of what twitter can do, or maybe I just haven't been on there that much and I can't see that huge value that everybody else does. I don't believe one has to use every social media platform just because it's there, find the right one(s) for your business, maintain it and maximise its performance.

Having said that, I am going to experiment with twitter for a while. If there are so many people raving about it, I want to know why.