Twitter is a favorite target of the social marketer. Ask any supposed social expert how to get more engaged users, and they'll tell you just to join Twitter and start tweeting. It won't work. Actually Twitter doesn't really work for anything, or do anything. Here's why.
There is only one kind of regular Twitter user. Just one. The only kind of person who uses Twitter is someone who's selling something.
They could just be selling themselves, as in the case of the many celebrities you may have heard are tweeting endlessly there. Some of them are trying to sell their website, drive traffic to it through their tweets. Others are actually selling products. Some are selling political messages. But everyone who actually uses Twitter with any regularity is selling something.
That wouldn't be a problem if there was actually anyone to sell it to, but there are no buyers. @ThatKevinSmith has nearly two million follows, but at least half of them, the most active half, are sellers hoping to suck up to him as a way of getting their own wares sold by extension. The other half are sycophants, who were probably going to buy whatever he was selling anyway, and truthfully only have half-marginally active accounts themselves. They're not exactly tweeting giants.
The thing is, even if there were any buyers on there to make all the selling worthwhile, it wouldn't matter. Follow more than ten people and your twitter feed turns into an overwhelming mess of tweets. You'll never see 90% of the tweets that flow through your feed, unless you're literally checking it every second. No one's doing that.
I know this because I use twitter, regularly. I have a follower count in the six figure range. If I tweet a link, guess how many referrals actually flow from Twitter to my link? I'm lucky if it's more than one hundred. Normally it's probably more like ten.
Or here's a more extreme example. I've had links tweeted by major twitter influencers. People like the aforementioned @ThatKevinSmith and others. Imagine someone with two-million twitter followers tweets your link. You'd expect a least a few hundred thousand conversions wouldn't you? It doesn't happen. Try more like a thousand.
That's what happens when you run a service populated entirely by sellers. For Twitter to matter it also needs buyers, and right now it doesn't have them.
