If you submit information to Twitter, do you expect the information to be available for an indefinite time? If you go to a Blog, a Forum or a social community of questions and answers, you will find that any information you post will have a shelf life of years. Therefore, you labor efforts will continue to benefit the Internet, your website, yourself for many years to come. However, the micro-blog Twitter.com does not maintain your information for a very long time…there is an expiration date on your labor efforts.

Since postings on Twitter are eliminated over a short time, then Twitter may not be considered a long- term content marketing tool for your Internet marketing strategy. Twitter is better classified as short-term Internet advertising.

Content Marketing is about posting information throughout the Web in such a way that the work being performed will have a shelf life of years. Information posted on the Internet, does require labor time. Content marketing is not automated; yet, the significant benefit is the ability to receive traffic from these postings through a variety of sources over the long term. When a website can continue to get traffic from a posting from a year ago, then your labor efforts continue to have benefit. Therefore, your labor efforts for Content Marketing tasks can be reduced after time and even after these efforts are reduced or ceased, you should still continue to see viral benefits.

Internet advertising is will provide you traffic to your website as long as you spend money for your advertisement. If the money stops, then the advertisement disappears and the traffic from the advertisement stops too. Therefore, Internet advertising does not have a shelf life and is generally used for short term response. While there may be some strategy on Internet advertising, Internet advertising is not very labor intensive nor does it have a shelf life.

Based on the differences between content marketing with posts and Internet advertising, Twitter would fall into the category of being a labor intensive social media marketing tool which requires ongoing labor efforts to maintain your business presence with your posts. Twitter does not seem to be a good business content marketing tool or worth the labor effort unless you are willing to keep feeding “it”!

Here is an example with our Twitter account. We saved two different searches. One for our company name and the other for a very popular article we wrote about the “court of the people”. Both had postings indexed by Google and we could see the number of interested Twitter members grow. We were unaware that this information may be removed from Twitter and we did not pay attention until recently.

After we followed-up on our measurements and checked these saved Twitter searches we found they all had zero response in the Twitter search results. This was quite a surprise for a labor intensive process in which we facilitated feeding Twitter our information. Google still shows the pages indexed, but they link to a blank Twitter page without the content. This would not benefit us with Google searches and eventually Google will remove the listings as well.

Our findings certainly raise a question if Twitter needs to re-consider it’s policies to keep posting for content marketing purposes. Alternatively, from a business perspective based on labor resources and costs, we certainly cannot recommend Twitter as a top content marketing strategy tool. It may be on the list, but not at the top. Based on our findings Twitter comes across as a short term response Web site for current activity. This and link building strategy with third party websites can be accomplished from a variety of other sources on the Web where the content continues to stay with a long shelf life. Without any long term benefits of the posted information, why would one want to Twitter as part of a viral content marketing strategy?