Why Twitter marketing ain’t my thing

Lemon Troll / Twitter marketing ain’t my thing

So a few months ago I complained to a university entrepreneurship lecturer whilst at the pub,

“Twitter is for celebrities, Belieber-type fanatics, and the patient listener – us regular folk just tweet into the ether.” And his reply was along the lines of well you have to have something interesting to say and think about who you’re trying to say it to – he mentioned that he managed about 8 different accounts suited for different audiences, but you know that this stuff is easier said than done.

Before that, one September afternoon I tried a little experiment and it gave me some metrics with which to gauge my appropriate level of disdain. I started a handle called @GiffGaffNick, sad but true, where I attempted to connect disgruntled Pay-as-you-Go customers with an easy alternative, and I offered to provide as much customer service as possible – I hadn’t got round to reading the 4-hour w0rk week at this point, but had been inspired by an online power kite retailer. Urging customers to seek their advice was their edge, as most retailers claimed they could match anyone else on price (kitemare.com). I used a free trial of TweetAdder to search and follow 1000 suitable candidates –  even in this relatively small sample, the presence Beliebers in my Twitter Feed became overwhelming (also Andrea Grande & 1D ). Of these 250 followed me back, 5 expressed interest, 1 favourited a recommendation that I gave him. I even checked signal coverage in the area for someone and sent them a map. Just 3 clicked on the link and in the end only one converted in activating a sim, and that only came months after they had ordered it. I saw the paltry £5 for my efforts as a lesson learnt:

1. People will follow back to keep up their  follower count- but the number probably means more to them than what you have to say.
2. Only sales talk and promotions tweets neither harm nor affirm you, even conversational one. People have trained themselves to ignore even the only semi-mundane (well at least I thought the deal was exciting) – though I should mention my 40-sumthing tweets were largely spread out over 5 sessions. For me as a follower this would be quite excessive (I decided to put bbc news tweets into a different folder), but maybe this data alone isn’t enough to draw a conclusion – I had no data on how many had actually read my messages.
3. These things take time, perhaps too much time for someone unestablished.

But I’ve jumped the gun, I didn’t learn point 3.) until I had conspired to tried again with a different approach. I came across an interesting non-celeb account @antijokeapple. No Retweets, no conversations, (and I’ve just noticed no credit for my “#WeCantTextIf you don’t have a phone.” gag), in fact no other messages besides jokes and non-jokes such as: “Slut jokes are so whoreable”, “Guess what I saw today? Everything I looked at.”, and my personal favourite, “Two women were sitting quietly.” I can see why it’s approaching 700,000 followers without resorting to my dirty ‘follow me back trick’ – it’s no fuss and all about the entertainment.

So I started a Lemon themed account as an hommage to the apple. Don’t worry it wasn’t completely random, you see I’m doing a competition called ‘Make Design Sell’ and the idea is to promote a charity called Citrus Saturday while turning a profit. While currently our concept of a bike-powered juicer remains to be built (coming to a Camden Market stall near you 2nd-3rd March 2013) I thought promoting the cause with an ironic “Bitter Lemon” teasers campaign wouldn’t do any harm.

However on this occasion I made the mistake of starting by promoting the ‘youth entrepreneurship’ message of Citrus Saturday, and then using TweetAdder to aggressively follow accounts pertaining to any ‘Camden’  reference. I got Re tweeted by @LoveCamden easy as wink, who have a 7,000 following of likely my most relevant target audience – but there wasn’t a whisper. I don’t know if that’s because @LemonyLondon just seemed unestablished or just plain random – perhaps it was simply too convoluted a message to mix Lemon puns with promoting the cause. In any case my account got suspended for too aggressive use of the TweetAdder software. If I try again I’m hoping someone out there can correct my clearly misguided efforts, or simply join my supposition that Twitter isn’t for making introductions.

bike-powered juicer TBC