Twitter Marketing Requires Trust

By TwitterFools Editorial Staff, November 18th, 2009 in News | Comments

Twitter has been around since 2006, and you can’t really talk about Twitter’s meteoric rise without at least mentioning the legions of affiliate marketers who try to use Twitter to sell something. It’s hard to gauge how many affiliate marketers are using Twitter, but there are clearly a lot of them, and it’s also clear that many of them have no clue how to sell on Twitter. We’re not the first to notice this. Recently, the affiliate blog on ClickBank covered how not to use Twitter for affiliate marketing. Last year, ProBlogger also did a series of posts about affiliate marketing on Twitter, and concluded that it has a place, as long as affiliates make sure they follow a few critical tips.

If these kinds of resources exist, if good information is already available about how to market successfully on Twitter, then why do so many people seem willing to take the short route from aspiring Twitter marketer to unholy spammer? I think there are probably several contributing factors, with some of them being lack of interest or lack of knowledge, while others are social in nature. Above all, however, I think many marketers ultimately fail because they either don’t establish trust with their followers or they violate the trust their followers place in them.

Most successful marketers know not to anger their potential customers. Sure – they’ll tweet about offers they’re running, but they also have more to say. Lee Odden, one of the best marketers out there, says:

Rather, consider an overall objective and keep that in mind as decisions are made about what kinds of personal info, links to useful resources and promotional items are posted. Over time, you’ll build a footprint and identify within the Twitter community. Building that footprint will be far more effective if you keep overall objectives in mind, rather than random information.

Lee’s point is echoed throughout the various blog posts about Marketing on Twitter, and that point is simply that Twitter is a community, and by choosing to follow you, your followers have placed some trust in you. What you do with that trust will dictate whether it’s well placed, or whether it will be revoked.

For new marketers – many of whom purchase useful “Marketing on Twitter” ebooks and training products – it’s all too easy to abuse the trust that your followers have in you. Sell them in your automatic follow replies, sell them in every tweet, sell them in every DM. If this characterizes your twitter stream, you’re probably not selling through Twitter and you probably have a fairly high follower turnover rate too. That or you’re just marketing to the couple hundred or thousand marketers you got as part of that “get zillions of Twitter followers” plan you purchased, and they really could care less what your selling because they’re trying to sell you too.

Please, for the love of Tweet, if you really want to be successful marketing on Twitter, then pay attention:

Twitter is community – even if it’s something of an ad-hoc community. You can gain followers – real live people who might be interested in your affiliate offers, and you can sell to these people. That is, if you don’t abuse their trust. First, build your following the hard way – if you’re a niche marketer, tweet about the niche – what’s happening, what’s interesting, what should people know about it? Follow others who appear to be interested in the same niche, and participate in conversations with them. People will follow you, and they’ll engage you as well, and you’ll feel the social give and take of genuine interaction with your community of potential customers.

Then, occasionally – maybe in 10% of your tweets – post something about an offer that might interest someone in your chosen niche. Don’t worry about selling them – let your offer landing page do that. Just post about the offer and link to the page. For example, if you’re tweeting a lot about health and fitness, make one in 10 of your posts something about one of your weight loss offers. Make your objective all about providing value to your niche, and select offers that add to that value.

As a marketer, you can’t underestimate what a gift it is to have a community of followers that trusts you. What you say takes on added importance, and your actions have consequences. They know you’re selling stuff – many of them are probably selling something too. There’s often a tacit agreement that selling is OK, as long as you don’t go overboard and dish out spam at every chance you get. Instead, treat your followers as a cherished treasure, and do what you can to make their lives a little easier, a little more fun, a little safer, or a little more interesting. If you do that, they’ll probably be fine if you happen to mention a great offer you have.

And you’ll probably be fine with the results.