One little Twitter bird sat on the wall


                                  (Courtesy of Dilbert.com)

I've been a pretty mute spectator on the Twitter thing. After having joined it in February, I've watched it grow. The fanfare has been getting extremely loud, probably too loud. Here's what about seven months on Twitter has taught me. My analysis on any subject tends to be simple, with focus on the benefits and the misfits.

Benefits

  1. It's instant. Possibly the instantest (forgive the word twist)
  2. It helps you learn
  3. It's an instant database (not a long-term one though) of the best sites, information, snippets, you-name-it-you-got-it, on the internet
  4. It can/might help you influence people
  5. It has a SUPERB SEARCH option (real-time)- You can read this great post by Ann Smarty of SEOsmarty fame
  6. Superb way to increase website visits
  7. SEO: Links, backward and forward, Click throughs, optimized clicks, customized landing pages and much more
  8. It helps increase a company brand value (Personal brand value also)
  9. If you are the celebrity lover (which I am not), you could follow a lot of them (none follow you back of course), message them(expect no reply) and feel good about it

Misfits


  1. It does not help you make friends. Common misconception. If that's your intention, head over to Facebook 
  2. Horrible for ad placement- Too many reasons. If you post now, it might reflect at any position on your followers Twitter Dashboard. Also, your ads will disappear with the occurrence of fresher tweets. This compared to email where you Ad remains in the Inbox, and can be read later if need be
  3. It is ruled by Narcissists, spammers, porn artists and people with pointless tweets
  4. Contrary to belief, it does not really help you influence people- Suppose you follow a company on Twitter. Has their publishing a white-paper influenced you
  5. It does not help sales
  6. Most people are busy tweeting. It's akin to you conversing with someone, but the conversation is one-way; while you are talking about soccer, your freind is talking about the next rock concert
  7. It is SPAMMY- Financial help, PORN (parents should never allow their kids, though Kids hate twitter anyways), Learn how to add a Zillion followers and the list goes on.
Marketing angle

If we take a marketers' angle (I am a marketer), here are few things one should consider before joining the Twitter bandwagon:

  1. Be very clear on what you want to Tweet about
  2. Don't just join for the heck of it. Formulate a plan of how frequently you are going to tweet in a day, what you are going to tweet about, and what kind of customers you can hope to influence
  3. Twitter is a 24/7 machine. You will require a resource (s) who must monitor your account
  4. Don't neglect your followers. Make sure you reply back/ Direct Message on time
  5. Don't expect sales from Twitter. It's a platform where you can hope to influence and not sell
  6. Twitter to me is the best substitute for word-of-mouth. If you tweet something of substance, which gets retweeted, you could expect a Pingomatic (My word: I'll elucidate in my next post) effect.
  7. Use an URL shortener like bit.ly. It not only helps you track your tweets, but also helps you get Retweeted
  8. Always Tweet within a limit of 100-110 characters. This allows for better Retweet value, and also the possibility of Follower remarks
  9. Try and Rewtweet also. This shows that you care about the community at large.
  10. Don't expect 1000 followers a day. Always remember the "Quality is better than Quantity" motto
  11. Give back: Have incentives (the #moonfruit campaign), offer prizes, organize competitions, have charity auctions 
  12. Last but not the least, remember that Twitter is social media. You do not thrive in society by being alone, not interacting with people and just living on an island.



(All icons courtesy of Smashing Magazine)


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4 comments:

ABHAY said...

Dude there many aspects of twitter that facinates me as a developer. Here are just two of the things that i have used tweeter for, but there are many other application of twitter that can be thought of.

Marketing - Well I can use Twitter or any other social networking site for my social network analysis, that will allow me to create clusters and i can do Predictive analysis on top of it to do target marketing. Which is what i did as a hack for my company.

Incident management - Twitter has instant information updates from million of users and is an ideal tool reporting incidents. A smart incident management tool can use the GeoTagged Tweets for smart incident management system, which is something that is already being worked upon.

Pushan Banerjee said...

Hey Abhay,

Thanks for the comment. Really neat points you've brought up here.

Some points I wanted to introduce here are:

Marketing: Agree partially with your pattern analysis thing here. But how does a company solve the problem about people randomly tweeting, like me. If you establish a pattern about an 'Informer' like me, you've gotten the wrong picture. Also, after having analyzed Twitter feed myself, my understanding is that 85-90% tweets are about selling something.

Incident Management- Simply put, why should a customer sign onto Twitter to report an incident. This is an user angle perspective. I can see the technology angle, where you can have a Tag map, and do a pattern on that too. But, why as a user should I sign onto Twitter just to report an problem.I'll use the contact form.

I'm just really taking the conversation ahead :).
Good to get a technology angle here. Reply requested.

ABHAY said...

Here is some white papers

For incident management - http://www.piersystems.com/go/doc/1533/269904/

For Social Network analysis

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1299869

Hope you like it, and mind you its just the tips of iceberg, so if you really want to research you have to google a bit more.

Pushan Banerjee said...

Hi Abhay,

Super! Thanks a lot for all the information. Keep me posted on FB about other stuff you are doing on social media.

Regards,