Very many interior designers, but less so architects, use TWITTER to support their business marketing efforts.
Twitter is very hit-and-miss. Some say,
Don’t bother using it, it wastes your time as it’s ineffective
Others say,
It takes time but I got a couple of project leads that way
I guess it takes just ONE large project to make it worthwhile.
the problem is that the way YOU use twitter is ineffective and you won’t get ANY leads but you WILL waste a lot of time. Well, that’s what I would say to a lot of designers but it probably won’t apply to you. Here’s why…
Twitter can be used in several ways including:
- You just tweet something to your ‘followers’.
- Let’s say you have 500 followers and each of those followers all follow 1,000 other twitter entities. So your generic tweet will be hidden away amongst those of 1,000 other twitterers. the chance of it being read are not great.
- On the positive side a generic tweet can be automated from your blog or facebook posts, so this could be a ‘no-effort’ action for you.
- Result: No effort, no REaction, ineffective.
- You genuinely tweet to an engaged community. These people are like-minded online buddies of the best order. Unfortunately they are all interior designers or interior designer wannabees rather than clients.
- Result: Lots of great interactive dialogue, huge amount of time wasted. Wrong target market. Ineffective but a great way to pass/waste your valuable time.
- You focus your twitter-efforts on relevant hashtags. Great, assuming that everyone else uses the same hashtag for the same meaning then you could be on to a winner here. eg #INTERIORDESIGN. This is great because you will reach beyond your followers.
- Result: Still a waste of time. Most trending hashtags are about Prince Harry or Kim Kardashian or something similar. the 5 people who tweet about your targeted hashtags are also interior designers. Complete waste of time
- You engage with specific people through twitter. This might be ‘some random person’ or it might be a potential client who has contacted y ou via twitter.
- This is fine. You are effectively using twitter as an abbreviated email-proxy. If your potential client wants to communicate this way then that’s great. But it’s just really email.
- You automate your blogs to also tweet the same headline to twitter with a link in twitter back to the original post. Kinda like I’ve done here in fact. It’s still mostly a waste of time (but you’r reading it aren’t you?) but it took me zero extra time to put the content onto twitter. It also creates a bit of corporate noise on a well-known platform. Someone MIGHT just look at your company and then out of interest have a nose-around your facebook page, linkedin page and twitter feed. If either are empty then they might wonder about the size and scope of your organisation.
- Result? Mostly harmless!
Anyway. You get the drift. twitter is mostly a waste of time. I blog in some other fields of business and twitter is a bit more important there but it still doesn’t lead to quantifiable business there either.
And yes I did automate this with a tweet. And a youthful emoticon 🙂