LinkedIn Survey Says Twitter is NOT Very Effective for Promoting Products and Ideas

Interesting poll results came out today from Harris Interactive which was sponsored by LinkedIn saying “Advertisers Much More Likely Than Consumers to Believe in Power of Twitter, Though very few advertisers and consumers say it is a very effective tool for promoting products and ideas.” Hmm, interesting a poll from LinkedIn saying Twitter is ineffective for promoting products and ideas! I guess someone should tell Starbucks that breaking news.  Since their “Free Pastry Day” promotion on July 21 dominated the Tweets and caused lineups at Starbucks around the country.  I really can’t think of a worse time for Harris/LinkedIn to say that Twitter is not very effective at promoting products and ideas when Starbucks just successfully did both: the product was pastries. and the idea was to promote the healthier pastry options available at Starbucks (which honestly I never thought of).

Now I do have to agree that Twitter is in its infancy, but now is when we are going to find out who the most creative people and ad agencies are.  Think about it, anyone who can create a successful advertising campaign with only being able to utilize 140 characters is a genius. These skills should  be taught in marketing classes around the world, not how to create a standard news release and distribute it via fax and email.

We already know there is a place for Twitter in advertising and marketing, just read Joel Comm’s book Twitter Power. How to Dominate Your Market One Tweet at a Time, One thing Joel says is “Your Twitter timeline is not a sales page.” If you use Twitter only to sell, you will be quickly un-followed, and your advertising campaign will become a bust.  For small businesses, the key is to tweet relevant information that will help your followers (advice, tips, retweet other good tweets), remember it’s always better to give rather than receive!  Once your followers trust you, you can send them the occasional offer.

You can download the Press Release of the Harris/LinkedIn Poll here: http://www.harrisinteractive.com/harris_poll/pubs/Harris_Poll_2009_07_23.pdf

I actually can’t believe they pdf’d the release, you would think a company in the marketing of information would understand the importance of having its content searchable (who hasn’t heard of SEO!?!) and being easily tagged with Digg, StumbleUpon, Technorati, Twitter by its readers.  This is so “old school” PR!

Jeff Russell