The other day I wrote an article about Twitter. When I did this I chuckled because I knew what was going to happen.

1) Many of the active people in comments weren’t around so comments would be light.
2) From what I can tell most the people that comment on my site don’t use Twitter.

Writing the article, I knew, would be an unpopular move (in terms of interaction) but I felt the need to express myself on the topic so I did it anyway. My core audience is the average, normal everyday non-geek person (mainstream-ish audience). Twitter has almost no appeal, Facebook is for friends only (people they know), they have no desire to try every new application that comes on the web. Matter of fact, their internet time is limited because they spend more time living their lives offline that interacting online. I’m lucky, I have the opportunity to find out things about my audience one on one.

Most people with sites aren’t that lucky. They are writing in the dark hoping to find people who connect with their content. That is where I think they fall into the pitfall of over-caring about traffic. People start blogs in hopes someone reads them, they check their stats to see if anyone is reading, then get trapped in being focused on the stats.

And unfortunately begin to care very little about the readers themselves.

You see this all the time. “I’ll do what I want, how I want, when I want but oh yeah, let me check those stats!”. When I see this I wonder how they expect to get traffic without understanding their audience? But tell me this: if you go to a restaurant and they don’t have what you want, do you stay? If the dealership doesn’t have the car you want do you look elsewhere? If the boy/girl you like doesn’t have the traits you’re interested in, do you make him/her your boy/girlfriend?

No.

Then why, while you’re doing what you want, when you want, how you want (with no knowledge about what YOUR readers want) should any reader stay on your site? What have you done for them lately?

And there you have, in a nutshell, why social sites are popular. Easy to gain followers with little to no effort.

There is a debate going on concerning the use of Twitter and services like it. Specifically, whether the time invested in using the third party services is worth it in the end. Receiving real-time news and real-time conversations. Keep in mind the people discussing this are business owners. The question to me is:

What does the business plan say?

Does their business plans formulate how to effectively integrate third party services into their business model to ensure the maximum benefit is received? Does monitoring Twitter or Facebook outweigh holding a video chat and interacting with the viewers? What is the goal of using Twitter? If one accumulates thousands of followers on Twitter, then what? If there are more followers on third party sites than the main site is that a detriment to the business?

An average user of the service, a business owner wondering if there could be a gain from using the site or someone who “really” wants to create traffic to their blog from their followers from Twitter…these people all have different goals, different interests and could require different approaches to achieve their goals.

For business owners, it directly goes back to the business plan and that is the problem with the economy. People with no business knowledge are doing business and not attempting to enhance their business knowledge. Instead of thinking “this is a cool idea!” how about thinking it through first and realize the strengths and weaknesses in the idea? Is the time of the CEO (or other high level officer) best spent interacting on a third party site instead of building the company site or doing other officer related activities? If investors are involved can the time spent be realistically justified?

Those are the real questions. Maybe one day they’ll get around to answering them.