Is twitter a waste of time or a real marketing tool for franchise organizations?

Many of us spend time following and hoping to be followed on twitter. Many businesses who are on twitter are saying they spend so much time on twitter with no real impact. With over 60 % of people who sign up on twitter to abandon it within 30 days and never come back. Is twitter delivering new customers/patrons/clients/leads to your website/restaurant or company? Do you see it as hype or more of a marketing tool and is twitter delivering results to you. These are questions that are buzzing on many people’s mind. Let us start from the basics, why is everyone buzzing about twitter. For those who are not familiar with Twitter, it is a text message messaging platform with a social media twist. People depending on their interest follow you or you follow them in return. It is a quick messaging system that forces people to communicate in less than 160 characters. Now let’s discuss it’s use, you can really do some really cool things on twitter but you must have a strategy, target audience, etc. All the whole nine yard marketing 101 requirements. Another good thing about twitter is, it is free! Because it is free ,companies must then quantify the ROI of twitter. As the saying goes, nothing is free. The internet is free but like everything that is free, there are cost associated one way or the other to the free-ness of it. It can be cost of time spent daily on twitter, cost to design a branded page or twitter page, cost to pay for autofollow programs etc. As a company, we offer or add twitter to the integrated marketing program of our clients to help drive our recruitment effort. I get questions from people who are curious to learn about successes on twitter and how their company should engage it. Is it delivering results many people ask? how is it delivering results. What metric is it based on? Sales of course?, traffic to your website or location(s)? in relation to the time spent, is it delivering sales leads or customers? In order to win on twitter here are my 5 key requirements to keep in mind. 1.Marketers must have a clear a objective before getting on the bandwagon of twitter e.g Are you looking to use twitter to recruit new leads, connect customers, send news to media, or just make friends. Must be clear on the objective. 2.Must be clear on target audience: this is almost the same as the previous point. The difference is who do you want to talk to on twitter. business associates, follow like minded people, may be people in your industry. 3.Must manage your time. It can be really addictive and easy to waste time on twitter. Can use tools like Twello etc to automate things. Like Google targeting, you should be able to use keywords to target your audience. 4.Twitter can really deliver traffic. Make sure your bio and URL is simple and clear. Like a business card. The bio section I understand is spidered by Google bots. 5.Retweet good articles to your follows, this makes you relevant to others and can increase your follower ship.