I was having lunch a few weeks ago with my friend Chandler who sells advertising at an online publisher and the topic of Twitter advertising came up. His personal viewpoint on Twitter is similar to one I’ve heard quite a bit recently: “I tried it out, but I didn’t get much out of it.” He said it tentatively, as if I might be offended, or exclaim some secret to extracting value from Twitter that had escaped him. But I have found myself questioning the value of Twitter recently as well. Our conversation evolved to this: there’s a lot of talking on Twitter and not much listening. As an advertising medium Twitter appears to have decent reach, but is reach meaningful if people aren’t really paying attention? Further, I have noticed that many of my recent followers look like this:

Notice the thousands of followers and the clear commercial agenda. What seems to be in vogue now is to follow thousands of people, then drop the ones that don’t follow back, then follow thousands more, and so on. Having lots of followers creates the impression that people give a crap, but it turns out that on Twitter, followers don’t equal influence.

My lunchtime conversation with Chandler concluded with the supposition that Twitter users must be getting more selective about who they actually listen to, if they are listening at all. An increase in advertising on Twitter will only heighten the need to filter out the signal from the noise, which means that advertisers will be putting a lot of effort in to marketing to the void.

I’ve been researching this topic and mulling it over since my conversation with Chandler, then got this email today from another friend:

It’s hard not to agree!
http://www.mediapost.com/blogs/raw/?p=3679
Hal

The link describes the story of Leo Laporte, a well-known technology journalist who stopped Tweeting for a few weeks only to find that nobody seemed to notice. In Leo’s words, “I was shouting into a vast echo chamber where no one could hear me because they were too busy shouting themselves.”

Laporte has nicely phrased what Chandler and I were trying to articulate, but my intervening research tells me that we had it at least partially wrong. I didn’t find any data trending people’s propensity to listen. A few things I did find:

• Only 7% of Americans actively use Twitter, but those 7% are more affluent, more educated and tend to be early technology adopters in comparison to the online population as a whole. They also seek and give brand and product advice using Twitter. Source: Edison Research
• 300,000 new users are signing up for Twitter every day. Source: Huffington Post
• Globally, Twitter use has exploded.Worldwide traffic to Twitter.com has more than doubled in the past year. Source: Comscore

With that kind of growth, it is too soon to say what Twitter is or isn’t. The way people are using Twitter is bound to be evolving. And anecdotally I know several local businesses that are finding new customers through their Twitter accounts. I still believe that broadcast advertising will fail on Twitter, but I don’t think we can extrapolate from our own personal experiences to say that Twitter is not an effective marketing medium. It may take work to get people to pay attention, but the payoff is a fast-growing, affluent population. If you are an SMB with limited time and resources, you should gauge the effort versus the return. If your target market is well-to-do, educated early-adopters, it is probably worth it. If you are a plumber or a dry cleaner, you should give it an honest try and see if you enjoy tweeting. If you find it a chore, your time is better spent elsewhere. At least for now.

And if you are looking for more tweets to ignore, mine are as good as any  @nicobrx

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