The Twitter Test should Brands truly be using Twitter to advertise

Anyone who reads my posts here or in the Advertising Trade Journals knows I am not an advocate of Twitter as an Advertising Medium. Ad Age gives 5 new people in the Industry to follow each week. So I decided to prove my thesis about the clutter and use of this medium. I am currently following 15 tweeters, some are industry people and some are news sources like Rolling Stone, Vogue, Silicon Insider etc and one is a friend of mine.

Just from these 15 tweeters I have been seeing over 100 tweets per day. I am going to add a few a day that are brands and see how this volume magnifies. Because while I browse through the list of tweets most I don't have time to read because I have my own personal email, Facebook, and my work email to deal with! Never mind private SMS texts I get from friends.

I will update this are progress is made.

But my three basic premises here are:

1] there is a critical size of tweeters that once your following that many there is no way you can see each tweet, which means brands must increase the number of tweets hoping to get through compounding this problem.

2] The re-tweeting measurement is interesting. It is possible that many people all connected and following each other could wind up re-tweeting the same exact tweet/webpage/article within the group driving up this measurement yet not actually expanding who is seeing the message! So there is major flaws in this measurement number 1, and number 2 there is no proof a tweet is seen so tweet broadcasts are measurable but tweet views/reads are not (not sure if twitter can measure a click through to an article I am investigating). So the volume of tweets is not a true measurement of volume of people seeing something or of news getting around. But trust me whomever has the position of 'Social Media Administrator' is not going to be honest about this to their boss because they need to justify their paycheck!

Also I am curious when the Tweetbots will be developed. Studies have shown that 17% of all Click Throughs for Web Advertising are not people but Webbots created to rack up money for whomever gets paid for the clicks. And since another study has shown that 85% of click throughs are done by less than 20% of clickers (meaning less than 1 of 5 people are heavy clickers and the other 80% barely click at all) compound with the Webbots we have a Web Advertising measurement problem.....but I will address this in another post.

3] So I am not a complete twitter basher the idea of a portable broadcast like the front page of Facebook (which is EXACTLY the same btw except without the 140 character minimum) is handy to me if I followed ONLY my friends/family. Though I can see problems tweeting 'I am at a bar come meet me' and forget people you wish not to know this are following you (and you have no control who follows you!)

I am a proponent of having Twitter and Social Networks monitored as a way to increase customer service, hearing what your customers are saying, and then responding to them. The real struggle is even if you have direct emails response is still a challenge to get through all the email clutter. I feel the best way for Brands to connect is in ways that a consumer is actually waiting and looking for a response. If you can work out how to do this successfully, a brand had better not keep the people waiting!