Twitter May Not Be A Very Good Content Marketing Tool

By teamsf

We learned recently that information submitted to the micro-blog, Twitter.com, does not continually remain on Twitter.com. Since postings on Twitter are eliminated over time, then Twitter may not be considered an effective long- term content marketing tool for your Internet marketing strategy. Instead, it might better fall into the category of short-term Internet advertising.

The general concept of Content Marketing is to post information throughout the Web in such a way that the work being performed will have a shelf life of years. Information posted on the Internet, for the most part, requires labor. Nothing is very automated about this posting process; yet, the significant benefit is the ability to garner traffic from these postings through a variety of sources over the long term. Content Marketing tasks can be reduced after time and even after these efforts are reduced or ceased, you should still continue to see viral benefits.

If we compare this to Internet advertising, the general routine is that as long as you have money for your an ad, the ad will help drive traffic to your Web site. If the money stops, then the ad disappears and the traffic from the ad stops.. For this reason, Internet advertising does not have a shelf life and is generally a short term response. Internet advertising is not very labor intensive.

Twitter, on the other hand, appears to be a labor intensive social media marketing tool which requires ongoing labor to maintain a presence with your posts. For something considered to be a “blog” of sorts, we have to wonder if this process really benefits a content marketing strategy.

As an example, in our Twitter account we saved two different searches. One for our company name “smartfinds” and the other for a very popular article we wrote about the “court of the people”. Both had postings indexed by Google and we could see the number of interested Twitter members grow. Unaware that this information may come down from Twitter, we did not pay close attention, onlyto occasionally check our saved Twitter searches.

Recently, we checked these saved Twitter searches and found they all had zero response. This was quite a surprise for a labor intensive process. The Google indexed pages are still intact; however, they link to a blank Twitter page without the content. This would not benefit us with Google searches and eventually Google will remove the listings as well.

Our recommendation is for Twitter to re-consider its policies and keep postings for content marketing purposes. Twitter currently acts as a short term response Web site for current activity. This and relationship building can be accomplished from a variety of other sources on the Web where the content continues to stay. Without any long term benefits of the posted information, why would one want to Twitter as part of a viral content marketing strategy?