Twitter launched advertising for businesses a few weeks ago and I wanted to weigh in on the viability of advertising on the platform for contractors and I can sum it up in one word…Don’t. At least not now. If you need my reasons, keep reading, if that satisfied you, have a great day!
Why Twitter advertising stinks for contractors…
You can only promote (advertise) a specific tweet (advertisement) or Twitter user page. To me, this is flawed for a few reasons.
1. If I am going to advertise, I want people who respond coming back to my homepage, my digital showroom, my place on the web, not to Twitter. This is digital sharecropping at it’s finest, and you are paying for it! Conversely, Google PPC takes you to a specific page on YOUR site and even Facebook let’s you promote a site aside from Facebook.
2. Secondly, as of this writing people friggin’ hate sponsored tweets! Hate them! Maybe that will change, but on Monday May 27th 2013, they hate ’em.
3. Go back and read number one.
4. Contractors barely ‘get’ the usefulness of Twitter to begin with, but if you understand that twitter is more of a listening post than one where you post your message, you will understand why advertising on the platform won’t work.
5. Twitter hasn’t made it local enough. Sure social media is about hitting the masses, but what Twitter fails at here (as do most social networks) is that contractors work a farm. A specific area near their shops or homes, and the don’t stray much further than that. So paying for a sponsored tweet in New Mexico when you live in New York isn’t going to yield much business. If Twitter made it more localized either by search results or IP address, it could work, but an entire industry won’t use this platform because it isn’t granular enough.
These are just a few reasons I think Twitter advertising for contractors isn’t viable at the moment, and I still don’t think Facebook is a viable solution, but that was a different post.
if you find Twitter working for you let me know how and I will share it with the rest of the class.