[ ! ] The Sugarbuzz Project

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Sometimes you can find some pretty interesting things on Twitter, provided you are following the right people. Here’s a little nugget that popped up in my timeline, and I thought it was interesting enough to write a blog post about.

@danschawbel QUESTION OF THE DAY: What would you rather have 100,000 Twitter followers or 30,000 blog subscribers?

For me, this was a no-brainer. I had to go with the blog subscribers.

Sure, everyone would like to have tons of Twitter followers, and they are great to have. One of the advantages of a legion of Twits is traffic. These people are usually following you for a reason. Some of them for marketing purposes, others to grow their follow count, but a solid chunk of them will be following because they are genuinely interested in what you may have to say. When your tweet gets retweeted, that just spreads your comment around to more potential followers. And as any good marketer knows by now, twitter followers are sort of like a mailing list with less work. Of course, it is also far less targeted than a mailing list, so your percentages will most likely be lower than if you stuck with the mailing list.

While having lots of twitter followers does have its advantages, I dare say that people who subscribe to your blogs RSS feed have far better advantages.

First, people will not subscribe to your feed to boost the amount of feeds in their readers. That is just silly. People grab a feed because they want to read the content, pure and simple.

Second, there are many Twitter users out there who follow people just to get the reciprocal follow, which gives them another person to market their products or services to. RSS feeds don’t work that way. Somebody who wants to market to you will not do it through feeds (unless you subscribe to theirs).

Third, blog posts stick around. Tweets are probably not viewed beyond the ‘current’ timeline of a Twitter user. They can be gone in a matter of seconds, whereas a blog post will remain on a blog for a while in most cases. And since a post has a title, it is usually easier to find in the archives than looking for a tweet that was issued a few months ago.

Another advantage that feeds have over twits is that tweets are only visible while you are logged into Twitter (or on a client). Again, persistance is key. When you use Twhirl (or a program like it), you are only getting recent tweets (usually within the last minute) whereas with a feed reader, you are presented with posts that you have not seen that go back as far as the feed settings will allow. And while RSS readers may not actually visit your site, they are still getting the content, whether it be your commentary, marketing, or whatever.

I’m sure there are people that would rather have the Twitter followers, and that is fine. But from a marketing standpoint, it makes more sense to build your RSS feed than your follower count. Also, when you develop a loyal reader base, they will most likely follow you on Twitter, so focusing on the feed yeilds benefits that far outweigh focusing on the followers.