Recently I heard a client exhorting an employee who was blathering on (and on, and on. . .) to “keep it tweetable!” This got me to thinking about the vast amount of marketing gems floating around out there, and the fact that right now, Almost Everything Marketing seems to be designed to pander to the 140 characters of goodness that is Twitter.
“A-well-a, everybody’s heard about the bird
Bird, bird, bird, b-bird’s the word. . .”
The thing is though, not everything is, or should be, tweetable. Here’s some stuff you need to know, and share:
- Tweets are there to entice, to tease, to provoke
- You absolutely cannot tell a story with them
- Twitter should not be your entire marketing strategy
- Twitter should not be your entire social media strategy
- There is a strategy to using Twitter
Sure, definitely use Twitter if you’ve got a solid, standalone message to send that can be captured crisply in 140 characters or less. These things are cool, and can often get retweeted as-is. Yum.
Three things to remember, though:
- A tweet cannot sell one customer based on another customer’s success. For that you need a case study.
- A tweet cannot get a bunch of folks to register for your spiffy event. For that you need a well-crafted newsletter or emailer. And a kick-ass landing page so they can click ‘Register.”
- A tweet cannot convey the detail of the new technology that you have developed to revolutionize an industry. You need a compelling, sexy blog post for that.
Sure, use a sweet tweet as one of the vehicles to drive your followers to that case study, landing page, or blog post, but don’t fall into the trap of thinking that Twitter can do all the heavy lifting in your marketing world.
Oh, and if the lyrics up top got you all in the mood, feel free to sing along. 
