Social Marketing Expert: Why I Left Twitter After a Week

By Rodney Brooks, on May 20th, 2009

Is there any point in joining Twitter?

What good can it really do for your business?

These are the questions that social marketing Twitter specialist Mark Shaw answers in the first show in his new business television series.

Produced by yourBusinessChannel, the show is packed with social marketing tips and business advice on getting great results from Twitter.

In this show Shaw explains how the first time he tried Twitter, after a week he gave up on it. He’d heard all the business advice about what a great social marketing platform it was, but his first impressions were not positive.

For one thing, the Twitter website itself didn’t make any sense. It didn’t seem like you could actually do much on it.

Shaw says he also couldn’t see where Twitter would fit into a small business marketing strategy, despite what all the social marketing and business experts were saying. How could telling everyone that you were about to eat a cheese sandwich help your business?

A little while later, he tried Twitter again, but this time he looked into it a lot deeper.

Shaw is now a total convert to Twitter for business, and is a leading UK consultant in advising businesses on social marketing with Twitter.

So what made him change his mind?

Quite a few things, actually.

First, it occurred to him that it would be possible to build a massive following on Twitter, and to leverage this in your marketing.

Second, he saw that by following some of his business heroes, he could learn a tremendous amount about doing business. Shaw also realized that it was a mistake to expect to get good value from Twitter as a business tool just by using the Twitter website. Twitter only comes into its own, he realised, when you use Twitter applications.

Shaw outlines many of the benefits that Twitter can achieve for your business in the rest of the show.