On Twitter And Conversion

If you use Twitter solely for personal use, this Blog post is not for you. If you use Twitter for your business or your brands, there has to be some kind of conversion at the end of the day.

How’s that going for you?

There does seem to be some kind of race to get as many people following you on Twitter, and an equal pace to ensure that you can stay involved and engaged in the myriad of conversations. From the looks of it, people with tens of thousands of followers seem to be quickly realizing how unscalable that model is and how much time it does take to keep on top of it all. I recently heard Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine Library TV (he has close to 600,000 followers on Twitter) say something to the effect of, "people ask me all of the time how I can spend so much time on Twitter Search and still grow my business? Since when does caring and responding to what people say about you not your business?"

There has to be some kind of breaking point.

Here’s a potential scenario: someone with a Vaynerchuk-like following is constantly tweeting. The amount of content is staggering (great links, tons of info, references to other great people to follow on Twitter). There’s so much content flow that the average follower who checks their Twitter stream only a couple of times per day just sees a sea of content. On the other hand, someone with a more modest following (says a couple of hundred followers) has a different type of relationship with their online community because they’re only tweeting a handful of times per day, so those who are connected pay close attention to each and every tweet.

Which one do you think converts more and most effectively?

I keep going back and forth. On one hand, it must be easier to get more people to take action when you have a heavy user base. On the other hand, the mass amount of content being pumped out to sustain that huge following might make each post have less value (or significance) to the audience.

What do you think is the ideal formula to have great conversion using Twitter?