Twitter and the Internet Marketing Machine

Although currently Twitter is more hype than it is popular there a clear sign that it is gaining steam. More and more companies are including it as part of their viral marketing and overall digital customer relationship management programs.

Thinking about the growing popularity let’s take a step back and speculate the future (and partly present)

1. Imagine that the vast majority of companies/brands/products also have twitter profiles.
2. Now imagine that 25% of them are running a sweep/initiatives at at time (lasting a month) which involves you to both following them on twitter and also (the viral aspect) retweeting specific messages regarding their product.
3. The result: Millions of consumers retweeting messages about everything from new female hygene products and CAT scanning machines to specials on pork at your local butcher.
   

Would you unfollow your friends? What if they are all doing it?

Back to reality and the present…

So far we’ve seen this kind of marketing/adverting widespread with iphones (one of them was moonfruit). Mostly the strategy I’ve seen so far on companies using twitter to advance their digital CRM is to use it more of a notification tool on news/products/contests. Well that’s not so bad? It does feel like this is just the entry point/discovery they are doing to get thier feet wet and see what this is really all about. Whats next when they realize potential.. but what is the potential?

..but what is the potential?

Two of the top 5 methods that makes online advertising and marketing really work are:

1. Product relevance
2. Accurate market targeting.

Twitter does not really provide either of these things, but there is a big payout from getting people to twitter about your product/website/competition… Increased search engine ranking through twitters indexing & market awareness.

Increased SEO and Market awareness

One of the fool proof ways to increase your ranking through Search engine optimization is having your website and content referenced all over the web. The more it is the better you do. So if you have 3 million people twittering about your website or product your SEO is not going to be too shabby.

My speculation is that prize hungry consumers will tweet and retweet more and more possibly even putting the tweets up on blogs/forums. The sweeps/competitions which would drive viral marketing measurements up would also potentially drive the attractiveness of twitter down.

Think of those friends that forward you every chain email they get, and then think of how many more people would do the same with clear incentives.

So will twitter continue to grow like it is or will it turn from a great social networking tool into a advertising and marketing spam tool.