The Three Schools of Twitter Marketing (And Which One to Join)

There are three types of twitter marketing, which I’d like to call three schools of twitter marketing. You might already know about the first two. But I request you to read till the end of the post to find about the third school of twitter marketing.

What matters the most in twitter when it comes to followers? Quality or quantity?

This question has been there for quite a long time. If you are a normal blogger like me who follows the School of Quality where bloggers like Gary Vaynerchuk, Chris Brogan etc preach that quality of followers is what matters the most, you won’t give a second thought about quantity. I also did not, until I read this thought provoking blog post by Justin Kownacki where he says “Sorry guys, when it comes to your audience, size DOES matter”.

After reading that post and doing a small research, I found that there are actually two types of successful twitter marketing methods people follow (I’ll tell about the third type after explaining these two). Well, I knew it even before but I never knew there were as many people following the second method of twitter marketing (a.k.a Mass following) and doing it “successfully” too. And this is what I call School of Quantity.

Side note: I don’t recommend the second method to anyone. It might get your twitter account suspended.

How do these two “Schools of Twitter Marketing” work?

1. School of Quality or School A:

This is the school which you are probably following now. Best examples of people who preach this method are, as I said above, Gary Vaynerchuk and Chris Brogan. They say quality is more important than quantity.

Here are some qualities of the students/people who belong to this school:

– They follow only those people who they already know or who interest them
- They don’t use twitter auto follow tools (although some people auto follow)
- RT their very close friends and popular marketers
- Occasionally send out links to their blogs
- Don’t post affiliate links
- Interact with a selective bunch of people

These are some of the qualities and I’m sure you can relate to it somewhat. I used to belong to this school.

2. School of Quantity or School B

There are many people who follow this method and some are very successful. As I said, I don’t recommend this method but this method does exist.

I know a lot of internet marketers who use this method. I don’t want to name names here. You might already know some of them. I’m sure at some point of time, people belonging to this school followed you and few days later unfollowed you because you did not follow them back.

Here are the qualities of people belonging to the school of quantity:

– They follow anyone and everyone they find
- Follow people based on keywords
- Use twitter auto follow tools
- Don’t RT that much
- They (most of them) automate the process
- Post lots of affiliate links
- Some people post only links
- Don’t interact much

You can tell a few more qualities but these are the main ones.

Do you belong to this school? If yes, I hope you will read the twitter terms and stay within limits.

Both these methods, as I said before, work while the first method is better one to choose. BUT…

I would like to explain about a third method of twitter marketing, which I would like to call “School of BOTH Quality and Quantity”.

Why do we need a third twitter marketing method?

Justin says in the post I mentioned that when more number of people see your message, the higher your success will be. I totally agree with this.

When you have very less people to notice your message, your amount of success will be limited. By following school A, you focus only on quality and by following school B, you focus only on quantity. But the third school requires you to concentrate on both. You should give equal importance to both quality and quantity.

According to the Dan Zarrella’s hierarchy of contagiousness, you need these three important things to succeed with your message:

1. Exposure
2. Awarness
3. Motivation

Now the above three helps us prove the flaw in both School A and School B.

Defect in Concentrating on Quality Alone (School A)

When you concentrate on quality alone, the number of followers you have is very less. The exposure your message gets is limited.

Now check the hierarchy of contagiousness. The first requirement is exposure. When less people are following you, you don’t get exposure to your message. As a result, your message has very less chance of being successful.

Defect in Concentrating on Quantity Alone:

By concentrating on quantity alone, you are not getting any quality. How does this affect your success?

What is the second requirement in Zarrella’s hierarchy? Awareness

Your followers will pay attention to your tweets only if they know you (or if they are bored). Well, let’s stick to the ‘knowing’ part. Most people are not bored when they tweet.

So how do you make them know you? Answer is: By doing what the third type of people in twitter does and that’s what brings us to the third school of twitter marketing.

3. Qualities of People Belonging to “School of BOTH Quality and Quantity”:

– They follow people who interact with their followers (unlike school A people who follow only those they know)
- Most of them don’t auto follow people
- Track keywords and answer questions people ask based on those keywords
- RT people who post interesting tweets (not just a close group of people)
- Tweet links to their followers’ interesting blog posts
- Interact with all their followers whenever possible
- Post interesting tips to show their expertise in the niche

This type of twitter marketing helps you get more quality followers who will actually listen to what you say and act on it.

Now let us go back to Zarrella’s contagiousness hierarchy and see how our third school of twitter marketing performs.

1. Exposure? Check
2. Awareness? Check
3. Motivation (call-to-actions)? Check. Every successful marketer will know this irrespective of which group they belong to. If not, check out posts on call-to-actions and also read Copyblogger’s post on writing magnetic headlines.

Which school of twitter marketing do you belong to? In my opinion, it is no more a question. If you want to succeed big time, you should try to be in the third school of marketing. Gary Vaynerchuk, Chris Brogan and the likes have both quality and quantity even though they preach school A type of twitter marketing.

So, it is not quantity or quality. It is BOTH. Please share your views in the comments.

P.S.: I use to belong to school of quality. But now, I’m working on joining the third school of twitter marketing (a.k.a school of both quality and quantity).

Image Source: Crowd (Colour) by Wayne Large