Twitter List or Email List?
Are you building a good following at Twitter? I am. I love hanging out there. Don’t post a TON like some folks, but I manage to get a blog post and a link or two in a day and love #followfriday. Total fun stuff.
But if you’re building a list at Twitter to market to the people on your list, well… you can, but for how long? I mean, Twitter is awesome, and though I’m hoping it will be around a long, long time, I’ve been on the Internet a long, long time, and…
Stuff that was HUGE way back then, like Usenet (bulletin board type spaces that are more like today’s forums) or IRC (Internet Relay Chat, like today’s chatrooms except you can get to them from the Word Wide Web), for example are so used to was now.
An email list is permanent, at least until your subscribers decide that they don’t want to be on your list anymore. But their loyalty will stand the test of time.
Twitter may be a passing fancy, and if you spend a lot of time trying to build an enormous following without building your email list at the same time, well… I don’t think you’re looking very far into the future.
Remember how everything was so MySpace a couple of years ago? Or, how about when Yahoo was the premiere search vehicle? Alta Vista doesn’t even exist anymore, and we used to think it was pretty great until Google came along. And so…
It’s the Internet. Prepare for it. Get the people who are enjoying your Tweets today onto your email list. That’s the only way you’ll be able to keep them as your customers for a long time to come.
Just sayin’…
