Search Marketing Sage

According to a recent AdAge article, Twitter may be evolving and picking up some characteristics from e-mail marketing along the way.  Zephrin Lasker suggests that if Twitter takes into consideration what made e-mail marketing successful, the microblogging service may prove its $100 million investment and give marketers what they really want: real results.

Image by FG@flickr.com via Flickr

Like e-mail campaigns, it’s critical to find the right people to share your message with on Twitter.  With the creation of Twitter lists, it may become easier to target those you’d like to follow.  The goal being, those same people will follow you back — and they will if they think your messages are valid.

Tools like TweepML exists that allow users to find people that tweet about their favorite topics and follow them in bulk.  The integration of Twitter lists will take a similar technology and embed it within Twitter itself.  For exploration and learning, these lists could prove to be very useful.  For marketers, it means reaching an entire audience with a few clicks.

In order to gain respect and followers, however, marketers must communicate effectively with their followers.  And note, I said “with” not “to.”

Lasker put it this way:

The rules of etiquette for good Twitter communication are the same as those for human-to-human interaction (remember that?).

Twitter enables marketers to carry on a two-way dialogue with real people and companies.  Although the tool can be used for mass communication, remember that legitimate interaction with your audience may reveal the best results. Communicating on Twitter isn’t as hard as it may seem, but it certainly takes some training and strategic planning to be successful.

Ending with some words of advice:

Twitter is a relatively new vehicle on the marketing block, but the rules for successful Twitter marketing aren’t very different from what’s worked in the past. Start your vehicle. Engage. Accelerate.

Oh yeah, and if you’d like to follow the whole Search Mojo team, check out our TweepML list.