I have been on again, off again, about using Twitter. Over the past few days I have been off. For me the “coolness” of Twitter is completely over, and in fact I am thinking it’s “uncool”. Tweeting with just a few friends, maybe. Tweeting to help promote your product or service? No way. It’s just not time effective, and doing so may even be considered Twitter abuse or spam. Tweeting to promote is anti-productive, aka worthless to me.

Twitter To Promote is Not Worth the Time

It’s just not worth the time spent on Twitter to make dollars. What’s one update do when you post on Twitter? Pretty much nothing. Hardly any of your followers will see it, and those that do may not even click a link within it. You could increase your odds, and use a service to automatically post the same message repeatedly so your followers might actually see it. That is against Twitter’s T.O.S. though.

You could also go out giving free advice, sending out links as references, but Twitter will tag you as a spammer if you post too many updates with links in it. They will even nail you if you use the hash mark (#) too often. What the heck is it for then?

All said and done, even if Twitter didn’t see these things as spam, what is in it for you? A few extra clicks to your website? Maybe one sale out of thirty that do click on your links? How many followers do you need to make that all worth wild, 10,000 or more? More, way more. For me, selling a $45 product, no way is Twitter worth the time, and I was getting a 1:30 sale out of Twitter visitors to my analysis page.

Twitter Is Internet Abuse

Taking this a step farther, I believe Twitter is abuse in its self. Craptacular micro blogs about nothing. Digg and Stumbleupon are far superior in regards to pointing things out, and what you read on those sites are usually at least worth reading.

Twitter pumps out two things: junk and spam

The “junk” is the “Getting coffee at Starbucks” or “Goodnight everyone, had fun chatting with you all” stuff. It is those famous quotes you always see. Those quotes are really spam made by the updater in hopes you will RT them or gain more followers. All garbage.

The “spam” is really anything that is of value. Those spammy updates might not be of value to you, but they are at least of value to the owner. Something is at least trying to be accomplished out of it. It either has value to you, or the updater values it because they want to become instantly internet famous. Yeah….

So here is why Twitter is useless in my book right now. Assuming others follow you because they love your content/spam, aren’t they missing out if you only post your spam once on Twitter? You know most will miss it because they are following 1,000 plus others posting their spam. It’s like the mailman dumping all of the mail from your entire street on the sidewalk. Hope you get it. Maybe the wind will blow it your way today.

Why Not Just Have a Blog?

On a blog post, you can write as much as you want. You could include selling points, you can include media. You abide to your own T.O.S., and you do not have spend time following anyone. Those whom like your content could follow you by RSS, and every time you post something, your subscribers will get notified. How many RSS feeds do you subscribe to? More than 100? I doubt it. Odds are good you will see updates in your news reader. RSS subscribers don’t follow in hopes of being followed back. They follow because they are genuinely interested in your posts.

To top it off, not only will your blog get seen by your RSS subscribers, but it will get seen by a more important guy, Google. Google loves blogs, and could easily send you far more traffic than any tweet could, and it could go on for years. How much traffic is that worth? Way more than Twitter could dump on you. Let’s see, quality post, or 500 crappy tweets, @, and RT’s. Yawn. Waste of time, spam, and junk.

A Little Twitter Test

So while writing this post, I posted an update on Twitter. It’s a little Twitter Test. At 10:20 a.m. I posted this on Twitter to my nearly 4,000 followers “reply to this if you see this please. Just say Hi!” At 10:57 a.m. I had 5 replies. Was my message too aggressive? Was it spammy? A 0.125% response. Oh yea baby, it’s worth it. NOT. Imagine if I ran that test with 40,000 followers. Should I expect 40 replies, or maybe 50? Maybe it would work better if I abused Twitter, and posted it twenty times today.

My Final Stance?

I don’t know. I do know I am taking down my follow me on Twitter button after this post, and going back to the basics in regards to marketing my analysis. At this current point of time, Twitter is worthless to me, and I have wasted far too much time for its return. I may even stop working on my Twitter Toolbar.

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