Here is the deal about Twitter. It doesn’t work that well merely because there are so many spammers out there, that the people you end up following you are internet marketers. Since I’m somewhat of an IMer – I guess the phrase – “what comes around, goes around” really applies here.

Before we go on, I do believe in the art of networking with people on social sites such as Facebook, Youtube and Twitter. I think when people have a common cause – they will unite together and if one of them has a website – they will receive a lot of traffic. However, the keyword is socialize. That is the problem with most SEO specialist, they take their client’s website – follow people that have a common theme with that site. However, the specialist has to know his client’s business very well in order to communicate to the network of followers. This takes time, and if the SEO specialists are like me, they don’t have that luxury of spending a lot of time to socialize. That’s a major problem and the Twitter part of “SEO” will end up as a flop.

Let me start on the cons of Twitter. As I first said, your going to run into a lot of spammers. For an example, let’s say you have an information website that tells people how to lose weight. You look up people that are into losing weight and follow them on Twitter. They will usually follow you back. Before you know it, a lot of people that followed you back end up spamming the heck out of you. Sure, you’ll get a few people that truly will be interested in the articles that you tweet, but more than likely, they have spammers in their group of followers as well and your tweets and retweets gets lost in the multitude of tweeters.

Second of all, it’s very hard to say something important with just 140 characters. Heaven forbid if you have something to tweet and need to put a link out there – even if you’ve shorten the URL. So you really have to make your words count – in other words – try to get to the point!

Third of all, you are competing against other people. I don’t like competition and when it comes to organic SEO, I intentionally pick long tailed keywords with niches that don’t have that many other sites competing against me. Same thing with Twitter – I hate competition. There are a lot of legitimate internet marketers out there that are trying to get their message out there as well – and I’m sure they are not happy to see me their neither.

Now the pros of Twitter and how its really supposed to work is there are ways of finding common ground for everyone. Let’s say there is a group of people that is campaigning for a politician. They start following each other (once they find out who likes Candidate Smith). People within Candidate Smith’s group tweet each other on getting press releases out, campaigning (who is going to knock on doors of what neighborhood), etc. Twitter can be a very effective tool.

I once read that some companies are into Twitter big time. They allow their employees to tweet about upcoming products and events that could be interesting to the public. The employees even tweet about the staff meetings and what positive things are going on. (Of course, you don’t want to have a disgruntled employee tweeting about the company).

My conclusion: Twitter can work – however, I think that the marketing side of it is really a bust. I and a lot of other SEO people have tried Twitter and don’t see the point of it. There has been professionals reporting that for every tweet – one per cent of their followers click on their links. If that’s the case, then what do you think the conversion rate would be. Not to good I suspect.