It’s been 2 months since I started testing the idea of automatically sending selected Google Alerts to a Twitter account, and the results are pretty remarkable. The Twitter account for @marketing_alert has attracted over 1,500 followers.
When I created the account, I deliberately made it as clear as possible that this was an automatic process, and not a real human running the account. I used the default avatar, used an account name that explained the purpose, followed nobody from this account, and stated in the bio that the tweets were automatic. I’m sure that if I had adopted a persona by using the name and picture of a real person, the number of followers would have been much greater.
So what is the value of this experiment? It shows that by simply auto-tweeting about a specific subject you can attract followers interested in learning more. 1,570 followers may not seem like much compared to the millions promised by the various pyramid schemes being promoted, but these followers are all self-selected. They want to learn more about this topic. It is the ultimate opt-in lead list. The pyramid schemes are all based on the existence of auto-follow bots on many accounts. If you follow millions of people, a high percentage will auto-follow back, but what is the value of this completely non-qualified list? Bulk growth of Twitter accounts is so early 2009. The real key to Twitter marketing with be opt-in lists like this one.
If you use this technique, you can grow a list of engaged followers, and then add whatever messages you want to the account. It isn’t spam, because everyone on the list asked to be there. Let’s say you are a band that wants to build a list of followers interested in your type of music. Just auto-tweet the appropriate alerts, and then add offers for your CDs at regular intervals. The same idea can be applied to all types of ecommerce.
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Can’t you just create a google alert and plug the results into Twitterfeed for free? What is the value add that I am missing here?
I have really been enjoying your creative examples of smart way to use Google alerts…thanks.
Stephen:
You certainly can use Twitterfeed with Google Alerts. The basic difference with AlertRank is that it lets you manage your alerts and filter them by rank, so instead of sending all your alerts to Twitter you can restrict them to just the most influential. You can also identify each alert as positive or negative and filter them by that criteria. Of course, auto-tweeting is just one of the features of AlertRank. If you look at the public account listed in this post, you will see that you can also get analytics, produce reports, search through past alerts, identify key sources of alerts. There is a lot more here than just what Twitterfeed delivers.
The ranking is what I was not thinking about. Very powerful stuff. Thanks for the clarification.