I’ve made no secret of the fact that I’m swimming against an overwhelming tide.

Yes. I am a Twitter sceptic.

I’ve dipped my toe in because it’s my job to work out for small business owners how to market their companies in successful ways – and that includes looking at emerging communication means.

And I’ll tell you why first. And then why I may have to recant (and also why I have no problem with recanting).

Small Business Focus

You see, I’m a small business advocate. All my thinking and activity is geared around that.

Small business owners have two primary scarce resources: time and money. In small business marketing, owner managers often account for the latter, but less rigorously the former in measuring marketing activity.

If it takes you 10 hours to make £100 of value and profit, then strictly speaking, making the same £100 in half the time doubles your profits.

So what does all that have to do with Twitter?

Do the most important thing first.

Do the thing which will bring the most far-reaching results first. Then after you’ve done that, do the next most important thing. Then the next most important thing and so on…

For the vast majority of small business owners with limited time resources, I’ve been of the opinion that for the time and effort involved, Twitter requires a disproportionate investment to the results it will bring because of these weaknesses:

Targeting

Having 1000 followers looks great. But what does it really mean? Are they the right potential customers for you?

Time

If I told you that spending a good proportion of your day text messaging clients was a profitable thing to do, you’d laugh me out the room. But that’s what people are doing every day.

I haven’t met a small business yet for whom Twitter is absolutely the most important thing they should be improving on to increase overall sales.

The 80/20 Rule

Work on improving what generates 80% of your current business by 10% and you’ll make a lot more profit than improving anything that generates less than 10% of your entire business (I haven’t seen one statistic yet where a company claims more than 5% of its business comes from Twitter – and it was a high technology Silicon Valley company at that).

More Channels = Better Marketing?

Increasing the sheer quantity of marketing isn’t automatically best way of getting more customers. If your message is crap, it doesn’t matter how many people you reach.  Of course, ask enough people anything and they will eventually buy from you.

But the smartest way to improve marketing is to improve the quality of how you communicate with customers using tried and tested marketing principles.

So, enough scepticism.

Why I May Yet Recant

1. Microsoft & Google It’s been announced by Bing (Microsoft’s search engine) that they are going to include Twitter posts in search engine results. Google followed up the same day announcing it will add it too. That means that Twitter now has a greater mainstream potential to reach customers and affect search engine results (but we’ll have to see HOW they actually do it).

2. My Dirty Twitter Secret In the past week, I just came across a dirty little Twitter secret that may completely change my mind about it. Well, it’s not really dirty at all, to be honest. But if you’re not doing this you’re missing out on a massive networking opportunity.

3. The Amoeba of Change Right now, Twitter is still in the early adoption curve. That means it’s got some way to go until it’s totally absorbed by the masses. However, I have no doubt that will happen, and it’s going to happen because of mobile phones rather than computers. Twitter is getting ready for the mainstream and the right apps to broadcast it to the masses accessibly will follow.

4. Broadcast potential. The broadcast industry has leapt onto Twitter. It may well emerge to be the best way to get their attention – if you have the right story, tell it in the right way and can get it to go viral.

Conclusion… Do I Recant?

No. Not yet anyway.

The vast majority of people are NOT on Twitter right now. Twitter, I believe requires a disproportionate amount of time to do which substantially decreases any return on your investment of time.

And that is the acid test for any small business owner: you want to invest less time in marketing and get more profit from it.

When that opinion changes, when I’ve reached a point where I can say to a business owner “Twitter is the most important thing you should be doing right now” I will happily concede, change my opinion, and recant fullyy and unreservedly.