Not a Twit-ophile?  You don’t need to feel unhip.  Twitter is not for everybody, and marketers should make note of this fact.

Twitter is a key marketing tool for people or organizations that

• have clever, concise things to say on a frequent basis
• market to people who are tech-savvy, who are on-the-go and who want to hear what they have to say as soon as they say it

Twitter has been a great marketing tool for comedians who have the discipline to regularly craft funny tweets.  They can build up their followers and eventually intersperse their entertaining tweets with marketing messages about upcoming shows.  Their target market is adults with enough expendable time and income to regularly attend comedy shows.  These are the people who have the time to scroll through and interact with their Twitter feed.

But what if your product is healthy lunchbox snacks and your target market is busy moms.  You’re wasting your time tweeting to these folks.  They aren’t going to pull the carpool over to read your tweet, and if they do, they probably won’t take the time to retweet it.

However, they probably check their email daily for important communications, and might also check their Facebook feed at least once a day.  If your clients are moms, spend your time developing your email campaigns and Facebook community and figure out how you’re going to get permission to contact them there.

The good news is, many social networks can be linked with each other so that when you publish to one, you can publish to many.  You can set up your Facebook account so that messages you post there are pushed to Twitter, for example.  This is not the ideal way to use Twitter – we can talk more about best practices for Twitter and other networks in future postings – but if your dollars and time are limited, it’s good enough and it doesn’t take any time at all.

So, don’t pull your hair out because you don’t understand how to use all forms of social media and don’t have time to learn.  Know what your customers are using.  Doing a Google search of “Who uses Facebook” is a good place to start.  I found this interesting infographic.

If you have a big marketing budget and someone committed full time to social media, then maybe you should be working all the channels.  If not, focus on the channel that will yield the biggest results.  Don’t worry about the cool kids over there tweeting in the corner…they’re just sharing jokes and you have a business to run.