Why you should NOT depend solely on Twitter for your marketing - Quoted from socialmediaexaminer.com

Are you too Twitter-obsessed in your social media approach?

Twitter’s role as a Magic 8 Ball for our shared culture is unrivaled, and it has almost single-handedly ushered in the era of real-time search and social customer relationship management.

But Twitter is the online equivalent of HBO – important more because of who uses it and the media’s infatuation with it, rather than the actual size and impact of its audience.

Don’t get me wrong. I advocate participating in Twitter, and I’ve certainly grown my own audience via that channel. Twitter indeed should be part of almost every company’s social media tool kit.

However, Twitter alone does not constitute social media, and you’d think it does given all the disproportionate attention being paid to it at conferences and in trade publications. Let me provide seven reasons why you shouldn’t focus solely on Twitter…

#1: Growth Is Slowing

The true size of the Twitter audience is a bit tricky to pin down because 55% of its users access Twitter via third-party and mobile applications. But new data from Compete.com shows a clear stagnation in Twitter’s runaway growth.

Has Twitter Peaked?

According to these numbers, the audience using Twitter actually declined from August to December 2009 (during the same period, Facebook went from 250 million to 350 million members).

#2: Young People Don’t Use It

Today’s marketing coordinator is tomorrow’s CMO, and younger Americans don’t embrace Twitter. A new Pew Research study shows only 8% of U.S. teens using Twitter, compared to 66% engaged in texting. Do young people not appreciate the m:any-to-many nature of Twitter, preferring the one-to-one paradigm of text messaging?

Regardless of the reason, as the current teen population ages, it threatens Twitter’s preeminence unless adoption rates soar.

#3: New Features Aren’t Being Used

Last Fall, Twitter rolled out the option for users to “tag” their location onto Tweets, to add geographical context. In true Twitter fashion, it wasn’t “rolled out” per se, it just appeared as part of the API that third parties access. Since then, .023% of all Tweets include location data, according to Sysomos. Not an overwhelming participation rate.

Twitter lists, while useful for categorizing people to follow, haven’t really taken off either. Nor has the new, integrated retweet capability. With each new release of features being met with tepid response, Twitter users are making the statement that they like Twitter just the way it is. That’s great for keeping the existing user base satisfied, but further impedes growth potential.

#4: Facebook Sharpening the Knife

You may remember that Twitter refused Facebook’s $500 million buyout offer last September. So as expected, Facebook just added Twitter-style features and functions to its service, to evaporate Twitter’s competitive angle.

Updating Facebook from third parties like Tweetdeck? Check. Tagging people with @ within status updates? Check. Posting to Twitter directly from Facebook? Check. Stripped-down interface option, with status updates at the core? Check (Facebook Lite). Retweet-style sharing tools? Check.

Functionally, everything Twitter does, Facebook does just as well, with the exception of mobile usage. Because Facebook has so much more overall functionality than Twitter, the mobile experience is a bit more clunky than Twitter. However, it’s important to recognize that 3 times more people use Facebook from a smartphone every month than use Twitter at all.

#5: The Better You Are at Twitter, the Worse You Are at Twitter

Being a new user on Twitter is as lonely as Michael Boublé at a Green Day concert. “What’s happening?” it asks, followed by a box and a blinking cursor. Twitter success requires an understanding of the unique rhythms and cadences of the community, and a give first, get later mentality that is a bit counterintuitive at first. The site is exceptionally poor at welcoming and training new users, which may result in its high churn rate.

But a bigger problem with Twitter is that like CB radio, it doesn’t scale well. If you have a few hundred followers, you can semi-coherently keep them straight, and watch what they are doing via your public stream. But once you get into the many thousands of followers, that public stream is a cacophony at best. Twitter lists can help in this regard, but many Twitter power users lament that the way they use the service is forced to change significantly as their own Twitter connectivity increases.

Much less time is spent in the public stream, where discoveries occur, and much more time is spent answering replies, and monitoring relevant topics via Twitter search.

When your most popular users are the ones who have the hardest time using your service to its full advantage, you have some issues to consider.

#6: FourSquare and Gowalla Go Back to the Future

The new location-based darlings FourSquare and Gowalla are stealing a lot of the place-based intimacy that originally propelled Twitter. The “original” Twitter contained a substantially larger percentage of tweets about the author and what he or she was doing in his or her own life at that moment. That type of status update has been migrating, first to Facebook, and now to the location services.

Because you actually know the people you are connected with in most cases, FourSquare and Gowalla feel a lot more like the original Twitter, with a sense of engagement that today’s Twitter can’t deliver.

#7: Measurement Lacking

Other than retweets and clicks – data that inexplicably is only available from third parties – Twitter provides no statistics to its users other than followers/following. Meanwhile, Facebook has been busy adding layers to its Insights platform, which provides a nuanced dataset enabling business users to test, optimize, and evaluate the efficacy of their time spent on Facebook.

The lack of integrated metrics on Twitter may not be a big deal for personal users, but for corporations looking to embed Twitter into an integrated social CRM approach, it’s a gaping hole that is currently being patched by inefficient, home-grown workarounds.

I love Twitter. It enriches my life every day. I hope it sticks around for a long, long time. But, figuring out what you want to do on Twitter is not your “social media strategy” – it’s just a short-term, tactical plan for a platform that survives despite its shortcomings.

What do you think? Are you still sold on Twitter?

For Complete and ethical Social Media Marketing /SEO solutions, contact us

Auto driver turns web entrepreneur - Article quoted from Siliconindia.com

Well this was an interesting article we stumbled upon today. Here it goes:

Chennai: An auto rickshaw driver from Chennai, M Samson has studied only till Standard-VII, but understands the medium of internet and online banner advertisements better than many local businessmen available in the society.

Samson runs an advertising website named as NetwayAdvertise.com. Talking to Satrajit Sen of AlooTechie, Samson said, "I started this website mainly for local businessmen who can't advertise in print or TV due to their high ad rates." Samson charges Rs.500 a year for hosting a display ad. Currently, there are about 15 banner ads running on the site and with that rate, he earns around Rs.7,500 a year from his online advertising business. The expenditures for the portal include a fee of Rs.2,000 per year for site maintenance and upgrading the domain registration, and a payment of Rs 60 to the webmaster for creating and uploading each banner ad.

It was not an easy journey for a local auto rickshaw driver to learn about the internet medium and the ways of earning money through that, but the ability to learn new things and earn more money helped Samson to reach where he is today. According to Samson, he was first introduced to the world of internet in 1997 by a traveller from Japan who taught Samson how to access and use Hotmail so that he could communicate with his foreign clients, whenever they would want to visit the city. Gradually, Samson became familiar with emails, and also came to know that news and information can be gathered from internet. In 2006, a British Airways co-pilot, who was Samson's client then, saw him accessing hotmail and gave him the idea to advertise his services on internet. "Initially, I couldn't understand how one can advertise on internet. So, my client from British Airways explained to me the concept of a website and how it could be used to communicate across the world. I asked him to help me in setting up the site and he was the person who went back to London and designed the website TukTastic.com for me," Samson said. TukTastic is a play with two words Tuk-Tuk, which means an auto rickshaw, and fantastic.

Once the site was launched, Samson started getting a lot of queries on email and SMS from travellers. "Though, I can't recount the numbers, most of the queries came from the foreigners. But gradually Indians were also catching up to the number of queries. Presently, I get between three to five queries every day," said Samson. Later on, Samson told some of his businessmen friends about TukTastic and explained the global nature of internet, some of them became interested and wanted to advertise their business as well on internet. But they didn't know where to go. "I saw this as an opportunity to earn money and thus launched the online advertising site NetwayAdvertise.com to help my friends," said he.

Now with Internet becoming one of the fastest growing medium to connect with people across the world, many people may try to follow the path of M Samson and try to do something different in life.

The company culture - By Sreedhar Reddy

We at tatvaa take our own share of breaks from deciding the company policy, business growth n' the usual stuff. And what better way to take the break than spicing up our work culture a little! Here is one of our team member's one such break story-

As a result of 'THOGHT SWAYING' process today afternoon (quite opposite to brainstorming process where we need to focus on one issue and beat around the bush) following points were worth recording:

• Status Update Meetings changes to 'Count on me' Meetings

• Work places can vary - Costa Coffee is an excellent suggestion!

• Card fever....our visiting cards should be nothing less than a dangerous virus as it spreads like one....collector's item types. Now our every visiting card includes a different one liner. 'legacy begins with us and then passes on...', 'If the work interests us, we dont mind spending blood and soul..' to name a few.

• Feeling of 'filing patent' can never match the feeling of 'writing a line sitting on a beach with beer'. So, we encourage our team to come up with more of these lines (not that they can't file patents).

• The way we learnt copy writing....tit bits to tid-bits.
• Conference room changes to 'Dynamic Centers'....the word 'conference' irritates me and nothing is fascinating about conferences
• Our toilets to be termed as PLAYGROUND (or TOY-LET)

We never tried to build culture of the company. culture was induced into the company and it stays as integral as it could be. what was interesting is we did not have extraordinary people working on it during extraordinary times, it was outcome of extraordinary conversations between average people (understated though) during average times.

Want to be part of a team that keeps the fun alive in the most hectic working conditions on the planet?
Visit: The complete IT firm - tatvaa.com