Future of Twitter: Thoughts on Alternative Targeting?

[Pripod]

Twitter was once a great targeted source of traffic and conversion for me. Lately, my all whitehat ecommerce website sees very little traffic from Twitter and the platform seems to gradually be loosing it's worth. 2 years ago I switched from using Hummingbird to Tweetadder, and picked up some very important lessons in targeting along the way:

a) Keyword Targeting is King: Conversation keyword targeting provides more conversion because you were targeting people who recently used Twitter. (This prevents you from following several dead accounts.)

b) Don't Target the Obvious: I switched to a high converting keyword that had nothing to do with product I was selling and sales went up 4x times what they were. I learned to target actionable people who have the money to spend on the product. Before doing this, I was just targeting keywords which topicly aligned with the product. I was getting more conversions as followers, however was receiving far less purchases.

c) Leverage Automation: This my seem obvious, however I was often needing to do this manually because Tweetadder was running off of my day-to-day computer which would frequently be turned off and on. This made it to tricky to automate. I purchased a remote server to run Tweetadder on 24/7 and it relies off of set keywords in combination with high sales geolocated targeting (London, New York, San Francisco) to automatically pull from when it runs out of a database to follow.

d) Bank on the Email Blast: The product I was pitching was a rather obscure product that many people did not know existed until i followed them. The real power that I found in Twitter is it's ability to deliver an email saying that I had followed them. This type of an impression carries much more weight and often would lead to conversions. For the most part, I just look at Tweetadder as an 400 x per day email blast tool.

I feel like the platform has been good in driving traffic in the past. My 8500+ followers used to drive a minimum of 200-300 in traffic to any location that I designate and now it only drives 10-20. Is Twitter dying? Are users just getting wise to marketers? I would say so based upon these statistics.

BIG QUESTION: While my sales continue to drop off, does anyone know of any other platforms which can deliver the same quality of keyword/geotargeting that is available on Twitter?

If so I would love to hear about it. I would really like any help that I can get on this! Many Thanks!

 

[Pripod]

Does anyone know any blackhat methods that provide this type of targeting? =)

 

[EddyD]

I'm very much in the same boat as you, I've been on Twitter since the beginning and have really seen it pass its peak when it comes to conversions, people will now rarely even click your links if they are even remotely geared up towards sales.

I personally just use it for traffic to the site and then if people are interested enough they will convert themselves into customers.

I don't know of any other place like Twitter right now unfortunately.

 

[Autumn]

Does anyone know any blackhat methods that provide this type of targeting? =)

High volume @reply spam is where it's at these days because a) you just get greater volume and b) the design of new Twitter means that people are way more likely to see @replys than they are to see your fleeting tweets in their stream amidst all the other garbage. I make 10x as much spamming the crap out of targeted lists of people than I do trying to painstakingly build followers (but it's still not making me a millionaire).

Twitter will indeed be replaced by the next big thing sooner rather than later, at least as far as its potential for affiliate selling, so you gotta beat the shit out of the dying horse before it finally kicks the bucket.

 

[muchacho]

Not sure I agree with the thinking that Twitter will be dead anytime soon, or something better will come along.

It's very much IMO a case of trust.
If Twitter users think you know what you're talking about, or providing them with interesting news on a subject they are very much interested in, then you're half way there. It's also a case of targeting the right audience with the right type of product - which comes down to a lot of testing. For instance one of my blogs is targeted mainly to teens who don't have credit cards, only their parents.

As for the following and unfollowing, well that's 100% entirely automated with software such as Tweet Adder and can literally be left on a VPS to run during every day on it's own.

One of my accounts has over 12,000 followers and the website gets about 500-600 visits a day. I'm currently going down the route of Adsense + collecting emails, to then send them an email when such an item is available which I know they're interested in as that's why they submitted their email address in the first place.... if you can get 1000s of emails on lots of different subjects you can market to them again and again.

 

[myapps43]

Much of twitter is dominated by bots that autopost tweets so who is really reading tweets? Also, twitter traffic is extremely poor converting. Yes you can get traffic to your sites but the traffic rarely converts. If you are in the US dont use it for CPA because most of your followers are from UK and a lot of CPA offers require USA traffic only.

 

[muchacho]

Much of twitter is dominated by bots that autopost tweets so who is really reading tweets?

I think that totally depends how you're finding your followers.

Target people who use certain phrases in their tweets. There's lots of phrases that a bot simply wouldn't tweet, or if they did it would very few and far between... i.e phrases that are mentioned from an individuals point of view... words such as 'me', 'I', 'Im', 'my'.

 

[Pripod]

I personally agree with Muchacho. It is all how you do targeting in the first place. Truth is that Twitter marketing software allows you to get very targeted which is very necessary for getting extremely niche product conversions. I would say that for every 400 people I follow I get one sales conversion. I personally think that this conversion is awesome only because the targeting capabilities are so good.

myapps43: When I hear you say that there is a UK overlap I also completely disagree as Tweetadder provides geotargeting.

Autumn: Following/Unfollowing is low key enough that it doesn't hurt my brand, however if I was generating @replys it would down right destroy it. I would be marked as a spammer and blackballed from my niche community.

My BIG question for everyone is whether ANOTHER platform exists out there that provides the same quality of targeting? I'm starting to think I may be out of luck...