“Twitter… Now You Can Stalk Millions Of People Online.”

I was doing some marketing research on Twitter and how I could add Twitter as another tool in my marketing aresenal. I tested 8 different Twitter profiles each centered around a particular niche.

I would post headlines from news stories that had to do with the niche with a link to my own blog. Twitter banned all 8 of my accounts for “suspicious activity” within 3 weeks.

From the perspective of a marketer, I don’t like Twitter. Marketers know that the very power to persuade comes from the written word. Have a very short one-line sentence to market with is like putting ear plugs in a blind man, taking away his cane, and then telling him to cross the street.

I then came across a marketing company that claimed to have discovered the secret of using Twitter to drive a massive amount of traffic to your website, so I paid $100 to check it out. The techniques that their automatic Twitter spammer uses resulted in another 5 of my Twitter accounts suspended.

Twitter has clearly taken a hostile position against Internet marketers and will suspend your account if there is even the slightest hint that you are using Twitter to either: 1) drive traffic to your website, or 2) Sell something.

Also, Twitter is a rather flimsy value proposition to say the least. The idea that a company could basically take the My Space mood box and launch an entire product just based on that leads to TwitTwat. TwitTwat is the act of someone trying out Twitter because of all the marketing hype, then after using it for 2 weeks realizing that Twitter is a rather shallow application to be wasting one’s time using. One thing that the Twitter executives have hidden from the public is how many inactive Twitter accounts they have. Sure they hype that millions of people have accounts with them, but what they don’t tell you is probably half of those accounts stopped being used after a few weeks.

For these reasons, I don’t see Twitter becoming the next killer web application. Right now you are seeing Twitter marketing everywhere financed from the $15 million that the CEO was able to convince some rather foolish investors to give him. Once that $15 million is burned through, Twitter will fall back into the darkness.

As to building a following, it is the same concept that marketers have been using on My Space. The idea is that you start following someone and hopefully they will follow you back. Again, you can accomplish the same thing with My Space. The reason My Space is the better choice is that the value proposition for the end user (creating pages with graphics, songs, videos, mood box, bulletins, groups, blogs, etc.) is much, much higher than Twitter. Will Twitter ever reach My Space status? Never. There’s only so much of a value proposition that you can build on when you limit someone to one short sentence and you take a hostile stance towards Internet marketers.