Perspectives & Strategy

A new form of advertising has started to appear on Twitter streams, it takes the form of a message that appears as if it is from a connection and you are guaranteed to see it because it mentions your user name or comes as a direct message. You may have received a post somewhat like this:

“p…123 men’s casual shirts   http://did—.com?=29… @pgiblett @pklicht @Market_Markee“

or

“a…more pc desktop computers  http://did—.com?=…f5 @mikaelaekholm @blake_a_crone @Buzz_Winkle @pgiblett @pklicht“

Now the name of the sender and the name of the site have been changed here in order that they do not provide further free advertising and none of the links are active, simply coloured for clarity.

One of the point that I made in my recently published book “Is your Business Ready for the Social Media Revolution?” is:

“The traditional mode for advertising is about one-way communication, yet to leverage social media it is essential to build a trust based marketing approach. Yes, Twitter can be a cheap way to advertise, but if advertising is all you are there for then people will soon ignore you, stop following you, or worse block you ensuring they never see what you have to say ever again.”

Sending out a post like this one when it has some relevance to the recipient (in this case the person whose @username is mentioned) can assist in their choices, but they need to be of relevance to some activity that person is involved in. e.g. a purchase decision.

The danger of this type of communication is that the recipient may see it as not relevant to them, and worse an annoyance. When communications of this type continue to arrive from this user it can belittle them in the eyes of the recipient. Articles in this column have talked about the need to build trust. Trust is important in social media. With tv, newspapers, and magazines we see adverts everyday, we expect it in that media. If the advert is relevant we look further, irrelevant and we ignore it. Social media messages on the other hand imply a connection with another person, often not the case with these type of advertisements.

In these cases the link went to a blog page and not to an on-line offer, but the effect is the same it is advertising that is designed to take traffic to the site in question. Furthermore having traced posts by one of the senders it is clear that the post content e.g. “men’s casual shirts” “pc desktop computers” (from the examples shown above) bear little resemblance to the target web page. What the advertiser is trying to do is simply drive traffic to their target site, and Twitter does easily facilitate this.

There is nothing wrong with telling people about things that you have done or informing them about products you have to sell yet it really should be done in a way that is relevant to that person and not in the format of a blatant advertisement. This is about the TRUST based relationships that we build on social media. Yes, tell people about your products, but don’t break the trust you have built up over time.