Chapter 64
Share Tips
Is Twitter a complete waste of time?
Many people think so. And for those who do, they'll love this study done by Pear Analytics in 2009. After monitoring hundreds of thousands of tweets, the researchers categorized a full 40 percent as “pointless babble.” The people who hate Twitter look at this study and use it to justify why they don't want to be on Twitter. I look at the same study and see it as precisely the reason why I do want to be on Twitter. Most people on Twitter are sharing completely useless updates like, “I'm going to get a taco.” Who cares about the taco?! The same study concluded that just 8.7 percent of tweets had what they refer to as “pass-along value.” Less than 10 percent were good enough that people shared them with their friends. It's not hard to shine in this audience! It's a fairly low bar.
Very few people are actually providing value on Twitter and that's precisely where the opportunity lies. When I launched the first version of this book in March 2009, I summarized it into 300 marketing tips and then released those tips as tweets on Twitter. Each tip offered some tiny piece of advice. One read “Conversations are markets. Participation + Facilitation = Opportunity. More tips at www.WebifyBook.com.”
What was I doing? I was trying to introduce myself on the raging river called Twitter . . . and if people reading my tip weren't interested, that's okay. But if they got some value from it, they could click through to my website ...
