With the rise of asynchronous social networks, it has become vital for marketers to develop a network of agents that relay messages to their own mini-sphere of influence. On Twitter, we call that retweeting (you know that). This new deal makes broadcasting trickier, because the marketer doesn’t control the communications channels anymore.
Just as Twitter definitely changed the rules of online marketing, it might also bring them back the way they were. Enters EchoTweets. EchoTweets offers a way for marketers to build a network of fellow agents that will automatically repeat your tweet. How does it work?
Once you sign up, you have 2 ways to invite other Twitter users to become your agents:
- Enter directly their Twitter username and password
- Send them an email and have them sign up as an echo agent
Once you have echo agents, go on the ‘send an echo’ tab, write your message, select your echo agents, and tweet away! (As shown on picture above)
I submitted my dummy Twitter accounts to EchoTweets to try out the features. Bit.ly tells me my echo tweet got 11 clicks, but as usual, it doesn’t match what I see on my site’s traffic 🙁 However, once you have sent an echo tweet, a copy stays in your account, and you can easily reuse old tweets:
Trust
I really like the idea of combining multiple accounts for one tweet, but I think EchoTweets will face a major challenge: Trust. It is already hard to trust another Twitter user enough to let him/her post stuff on your behalf, but it is even harder to trust the middle-man site that doesn’t use OAuth for identification, and doesn’t really offer a way for agents to moderate incoming echos.
Advertising
Maybe if there were a transactional component added to EchoTweets, one that gives marketers access to my account if they pay me, I think it would gain more attention, and probably become an excellent advertising solution for Social Media marketers. I mean anyone should be able to use EchoTweets the way they want, and integrating micro-payments could totally work (I would definitely buy Twitter users this way).
Unlike Sponsored Tweets where advertisers can only select users that have registered with the ad network, EchoTweets works through invites. An advertiser could virtually choose any Twitter user and invite him/her to tweet for $$.
Unfortunately, you cannot invite a Twitter user if all you have is his username (you need an email address). To counterstrike that, I think EchoTweets also needs to generate referral links that can be posted publicly: It would create a third, public and accessible way to send invitations to EchoTweets.
Non-profits
To show dedication to a non-profit, alternatively to paying a small stipend every year, maybe members could open up their Twitter accounts and let their favorite non-profits leverage that Social Media marketing goodness. Non-profits usually lack attention and share of voice. EchoTweets could help compensate their public relations’ shortcomings.
There are a lot of possibilities that come to mind when you think about how EchoTweets could be used. What would you do with it?