In the preparations for the big ad push to finally come Twitter is now nixing all third-party companies that have a business model based on paying for Twitter advertising. The most prominent of these is Sponsored Tweets. They posted the following on their blog today:

“We are going to make some changes to the way Sponsored Tweets works. We will no longer be publishing directly to your account through the Twitter API. Instead you will have to write the tweet yourself in whatever Twitter client you see fit. Yes, it will be a more manual process. Yes, we liked the old way better too. But we want to comply with Twitters guidelines and be a good ecosystem partner. We have always made adjustments to our system to remain in compliance. Twitter has allotted 30 days to make this change, we will try to get it out as soon as we can. Until then it is business as usual.”

So basically their service will help you compose a paid tweet, but then you are responsible for copying & pasting it into your account to be sent out to your followers.

If you use one of these services please reconsider paying for something you have to do manually anyways. Paid tweets will still be around, but pretty soon you will be doing them directly from the Twitter company. I am not really sure that businesses like this have a future. We will just have to wait and see

Have you heard of Twitter ? You might have – not sure. It is this cool little service that allows you to send teeny tiny sentences to other people all over the world. It has been in the news quite a bit lately. Some of the coolest things have come across Twitter – Plane crashes, people being arrested, people being hired and fired. If you turn on your local news station, or national news station you will find out most of them have a Twitter address.

As cool as it is, it is not for everybody. Don’t ever think you need to get a Twitter account because Southwest Airlines has one. Or because the local news anchor has one. If you have plenty going on in your life and you don’t need another distraction then please – do not get a Twitter account. Do something better with your time when it comes to marketing your business. You don’t want to be one of the 90% of the people that join Twitter and don’t use it. That is right – 9 out of 10 people that join Twitter do nothing with it. Why? Because they have better things to do. It is very possible (and likely) that there are places where you can place effort which will allow you to interact with your customers in a better way. That is the area you should be focusing your efforts into. Not trying to cram the reasons why someone should buy from you into 140 characters.

I like to look at it this way: Think about about all of the people in the world. A subset of those people are on the internet. A subset of those people are heavy internet users. A subset of those people are heavy social media users. And a subset of the heavy social media users are very active on Twitter. That audience is one of many that you have to pay attention to. If you don’t have the time or the ROI is not worth it – don’t do it. Stand proudly on your own two feet and say “No thank you. I choose not to tweet and I’m damn proud of it!”

Now excuse me… I need to go Tweet the link out to this blog post that I wrote