A few months ago our UK based team attended the Social Media Buzz event held in London [1] that our good friend Steve Mullins of brand-e was moderating.
[2]This, combined with the culmination of some work we have been doing for a large OEM client meant we ended up having an office brainstorm about Twitter, use thereof and figured that now was as good as time as ever to document some of our thoughts on the use of Twitter in the industry which boils down to the fact that we think that most of you are wasting your time!
Let’s explain. We definitely don’t subscribe to the (old) view of follow you / follow me and steadfastly refuse to aimlessly follow folks in the hope of being followed back.
We follow 276 and are followed by 1,305 [3] – about half of those people are nothing to do with our industry and have followed us in the hope that we would follow them back (building up followers for the sake of it is puerile although it does help one’s ‘impressions’ when we calculate them at shows etc. BUT we are already working on ways on stripping those out when we do our calculations).
Let’s say something slightly controversial, hardly unusual for us of course, we figure most definitely that our blog reaches the right people in the industry. However, we know that our twitter doesn’t (reach the correct people that is). If you twitter, it is most probably preaching to the already converted and it is almost definitely talking to your competitors.
When we first got to grips with Twitter we viewed it simply as a way of micro-blogging. We can tweet in a few minutes and get a story out really quickly – much quicker than we could write even a short blog post. Tweeting in such a way also drives traffic to our web site which is of course what we and our advertisers want.
Twitter has a role to play for sure. For us it works but for many other vendors and suppliers in the industry we simply think that you might just be wasting your time.
2 Comments To "Why We Twitter And Why Most Of You Are Wasting Your Time"
#1 Comment By Katrina Douglas On 25 August 2010 @ 14:36 @650
I definitely agree, I guess it links back to the whole idea of having a clear strategy and objectives behind your social media activity and if there’s no rhyme or reason then I guess there’s no point.
#2 Comment By Chuck Gose On 25 August 2010 @ 16:07 @713
And like everything else, including digital signage networks, the success or failure will come down to content. But Twitter is much more than just broadcasting to your followers. It’s also a phenomenal way to make new connections and pick up on trends.