Twitter: Nobody is Really Listening

Hello,

Last week we published a podcast where Sue Bell and I discussed Twitter and its relationship to Google Search.

If you ask most marketers what social media platforms are important from a business perspective, they will generally tell you Twitter.

Generally speaking this is because Twitter is the newest social media application and it gets a whole lot of media attention.

What they fail to mention is that since Twitter went mainstream it has been hit with TONS of spam and methods to automate and cheat the system.

It has been shown that most people are NOT paying attention to their Twitter Stream, except maybe occasionally.

Applications like Tweetdeck and Twhirl filter the messages and return twitter to a trusted status. But marketing messages seldom (if ever) make it through these filters which are growing in numbers every day.

People are starting to only pay attention to messages that their friends are sharing.

What is easy to forget is that on platforms like Facebook, people actually DO pay attention to their news feed. Part of this is because the process of creating the facebook news feed is far more personal and subtle. It is too easy to subscribe to people on Twitter that you really don’t care about. Although it is possible to friend untrustworthy people on facebook, you have a lot more personal and quality control to edit and get rid of friends that you don’t want to keep, and friends that you are interested in. Research has shown that there is a much lower tendency to follow complete strangers on facebook- creating the experience of a more trusted feed. Furthermore people do not really know how to segregate their list and therefore are less likely to perceive any message (like an educational marketing comment) as spam. People are getting more sensitive about this every day, but if you know what you are doing you can make the “social” currency work in harmony with the “cash” economy.

With all of the Twitter controls taking over the industry, it is time to start thinking about other feed systems inside social networks that are more trusted. Yes, you may put an opt-in email form inside your facebook fan page. But you must know how to add this features properly in order for it to be effective.

Twitter is good to thread through more trusted accounts, but it is important to know that it is currently a highly censored medium. Remember the easier a micro-blog system is to interact with, the lower the quality control mechanism . . . and the more impersonal the medium can become. This is almost like casting anonymous votes, and requires more work to get to know someone personally using the twitter medium alone. Generally speaking if you want to get to know someone better, you will meet them on their blog or at a third party space where twitter drives you. It is possible to both make and KEEP friends on facebook-like platforms, and much harder to do so on Twitter.

Next week we will show you how to add an email opt-in to your Facebook Fan page.

- Russell

Was This Article Relevant? Tweet it.