■ antiques WELCOME In My Opinion Twitter quitter I ’m a Twitter quitter. I say that with an enormous sigh of relief; Twitter and I just don’t belong together, and that’s all there is to it. Mind you, I went into it fervently hoping that it would work out well, and that I’d become as Twitter-addicted as millions of others apparently are. No way. I should explain that I was not taking up Twitter personally, but as a marketing tool for our antiques business. Lisa and I even enrolled in a seminar teaching small business people how to use the social media – which basically comes down to Twitter, Facebook and things like them. Carol, who was running the seminar, breathlessly told us that Twitter’s growth from January to February last year was 1,382 percent (I didn’t even know percentages went that high!). Do you know, there are 3 million tweets a day? Wow! Numbers like that make my head spin. Twitter, she assured us, will drive at least some of its millions of people to our Web sites and, in particular, to our newsletters and our blogs; Twitter’s a superb companion to a Web site and a newsletter, she gushed, because it is broadcast whereas they are targeted: it will update and enlarge our target audience -- her eyes sparkled with excitement as she spoke -and will “leverage exposure on other social media sites.” (She lost me there, I couldn’t visualize what “leveraging exposure” actually involved, but my gosh it sounded just what I ought to be doing.) And as a result of all this, “Fiske & Freeman” would be a catchphrase the world over -- if only we’d set it to music, they’d be humming it from Tasmania to Timbuktu. Oh yeah. You know what, three months later none of it has happened. Nada. Our Web site traffic has been as steady as ever, our newsletter readership has increased by precisely zero, but we did gain two new followers on Twitter. Now, I’m pretty realistic, I didn’t expect all of Twitter’s millions to rush to our Web site, and I hardly expected to rival Paris Hilton (I think that’s a person and not a hotel) in numbers of followers, but two out of millions in three months! And one of them was an Argentinean woman who seemed to have her mind on something other than antiques. On our Web site and in our newsletter we invited our customers and friends to sign up and follow us. We tempted them by promising that we’d tweet during shows to tell them what was arousing interest or selling; we’d tweet during auctions telling them the mindblowing prices; and we’d keep them up to date with all our doings. They loved these ideas so much that not a single one signed up. OK, so what are the reasons for my abject failure? I can think of three to start with – my ineptitude; age and generation; and the nature of the social media themselves. My ineptitude Sure, I’ll be the first to admit that I’m an inept tweeter. My mind doesn’t work in short chunks of 140 characters (the maximum length of a tweet), and as I’m going about my daily or working life I don’t naturally think, “Ohmigosh, this is so interesting that I must tell people about it, I gotta tweet!” But having said that, I tried really hard. I did tweet about anything that I thought might be of interest to people interested in antiques, but the numbing lack of response did curb my enthusiasm and the frequency of my tweets. If I’d tweeted better and for longer, would things have been different? I have my doubts. Continued on page 42 Page 12 ■ Antiques Journal ■ February 2010