Comments on: Is Following a Business on Twitter the Ultimate Opt-In?

By: James Richardson

James Richardson — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 01:54:44 +0000

I’ll be honest, i went through a stage there where I thought ‘Let’s build up as many followers in the shortest space of time possible’ Gee, that was stupid!

Now, I am busy culling back those that I follow, quality is much better than quantity,only in terms of who you are following of course.

Business’ using this philosophy will see massive benefits, I feel Twitter act’s as a soft form of ‘Newsletter’, one which I will actually read and pay attention to rather than instintivly hit the DELETE button.

I am pretty careful of the business Twitter accounts I follow, and will quickly ‘unfollow’ those who are ‘promotion heavy’, or ‘tweet lite’.

I want a little bit of banter, some customer interaction, and a sense that the brand is a little bit human

James Richardson
@jamesis

By: Amanda Jephtha

Amanda Jephtha — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 01:45:59 +0000

Absolutely, Clare!

Not only is Twitter the ultimate opt-in, it’s one of the easiest and most efficient referral systems around. You wouldn’t email all your email contacts about an article you’ve read or a website you love, but you will tweet it.

By: Glenn Murray

Glenn Murray — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 01:24:21 +0000

Hmmm. I think it all depends on how the follower uses Twitter. From what I’ve seen, the majority of Twitter users follow just about everyone who follows them, and end up following hundreds, even thousands, of people. As a result, there’s no physical way they could read every tweet they receive. So, even though they’re receiving your tweets, they may not be (probably won’t be) reading them.

Obviously there are exceptions (e.g. if your tweets are so good that people put you in a group in TweetDeck or add your tweets to an RSS feed), but not everyone can be the exception!

On the other hand, if your follower follows only a small number of people, I agree that it’s the ultimate opt-in!

Cheers, Glenn (Twitter: @divinewrite)