Is Twittering Necessary and Do You Really Need to be on Twitter?

As mar­ket­ing by pro­fes­sion, usu­ally we have to jus­tify our­selves to the bosses, the clients and every­one in between — espe­cially in the less-tested, some­times, hit or miss arena of social media.

When the lat­est tech­nol­ogy and the lat­est social media come out, mar­ket­ing pro­fes­sion­als who are liv­ing in the bloody edge of social media tech­nol­ogy will rush to it. Mar­keters have been so busy jump­ing on the social media band­wagon. Set up a Twit­ter account or Face­book page to test the pos­si­bil­i­ties of the tech­nol­ogy, expe­ri­ence it and see how those tools worked.

Then mar­keters tell every­body else that you gonna be on it, exam­ple, Twit­ter or Face­book.

The ‘telling you do it’ caused lots of com­pa­nies feel the pres­sure, they feel like if they don’t put some­one there and get on the Twit­ter or Face­book, they will out of busi­ness soon. Well, many of them even don’t know why they do it, why they should be on those social media plat­form, other than the fact that some­one told them too.

What clients actu­ally really need from mar­ket­ing pro­fes­sion­als is they need you to help them map out a con­sis­tent mar­ket­ing strat­egy of how to use the social media to their ben­e­fits, instead of just tell them to be on there.

By say­ing that, before get mar­ket­ing strat­egy into the place, the strat­egy has to come first, asked the ques­tions such as who are you as a com­pany, what or which media is the best chan­nel to suit your needs as a com­pany, what your mes­sage is, and how to apply that etc.

You may already see there some com­pa­nies are sell­ing, exam­ple, Dell, they made a lot of sales by using twit­ter, the rea­son for that is because their mes­sage, the mes­sage they pub­lic on the Twit­ter stream is suit with the users there.

As you may already know, Twit­ter is more about what is going on Right Now; it is direct inter­ac­tions between you and your prospects, exist­ing and poten­tial cus­tomers. If your mes­sage is not about that or not the now ones, then finds some other chan­nels that more suit to your mes­sage. You can still use Twit­ter, but you should focus more on the social media that allows you to really hit home run when you use it.

Come back to the ques­tion, “Is using twit­ter nec­es­sary and do you really need to be on it?” — My answer is it depends on.

If a com­pany doesn’t know what they’re try­ing to accom­plish, then there will be noth­ing to mea­sure and no way to deter­mine suc­cess. Thus, they should work on their objec­tives and have it into the place first, and that objec­tive shouldn’t be to dis­trib­ute a press release.

If a com­pany unsure of how to pro­ceed and hes­i­tant to dip their toes into the water, not sure whether social media is good for their brand or not, then they should slow down and get over the hes­i­ta­tion. They should look at their mar­ket­ing plan and lay­out a con­sis­tent mar­ket­ing strat­egy first.

If a company’s man­age­ment is skep­ti­cism and not clear where they stand toward the social tech­nol­ogy adop­tion, they should work out from their inter­nal issue first, because to achieve a suc­cess­ful orga­ni­za­tion, it needs high-level sup­port, oth­er­wise the ini­tia­tive will fail if man­age­ment doesn’t encour­age and reward participation.

On the jour­ney to Twit­ter, Face­book or other social media mar­ket­ing activ­i­ties, com­pa­nies will try new things, some will suc­ceed and some will fail due to dif­fer­ent reasons.

In regard­ing to the cost that spend­ing on the social media pro­gram, accord­ing to Mar­ket­ing­Sh­erpa recent sur­veys, there about 60% of social media pro­gram costs are traced to in-house activ­i­ties — such as staffers who cre­ate con­tent or mon­i­tor com­ments. And about 20% of spend­ing is out­sourced to con­sul­tants or ad agencies.

In addi­tion to that, there’s no lack of com­mit­ment to these pro­grams. The fol­low­ing per­cent­ages of firms, by indus­try, plan bud­get increases for the social media com­po­nent of mar­ket­ing bud­gets for 2010:

* Retail/e-commerce: 79%
* Publishing/media: 63%
* Com­puter hardware/software: 55%
* Business/consumer ser­vices: 54%
* Manufacturing/packaged goods: 53%
* Travel/leisure: 52%
* Education/healthcare: 43%

It looks like 2010 is the year that social media grows up.

In con­clu­sion, no mat­ter your com­pany will be using Twit­ter, Face­book or not, look at your web­site first, make sure your web­site is work­ing, put time and energy into its devel­op­ment, make your mes­sage con­sis­tent and make sure it con­vert­ing peo­ple when they come to your sites, the pur­pose of using Twit­ter or Face­book is to send and encour­age peo­ple to click on the link and back to your site. So under­stand how to make social media tech­nol­ogy work for you is very important.

If Twit­ter fits into your busi­ness, use it. If not, maybe it’s not worth the time. If you want to use MySpace to meet your goals, you might be able to do that as well.

About the Author

Ann Liu is a certified professional Internet marketer, passionate blogger, author, infopreneur, web and social marketing consultant. Signup for her newsletter or RSS feed to receive her latest news, tips and articles at http://MarketingbyAnn.net. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook too.

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