Twitter: A new user's perspective

I came to Twitter late, admittedly, for someone having worked in digital media for so long. You see, I'm no longer a digital evangelist as I needed to be back in 2000, I'm a digital realist. Consumers are the evangelists these days and those of us working in the industry need to wade through everything the digital world has to offer now to work out what is best for our clients.

So like many consumers, I never felt the need to join Twitter. So I didn't. I used Facebook for a few years and have just stopped using that (for personal use anyway - although I am starting to wonder how my primary school classmates that I haven't seen for twenty years are doing). 

My PR agency, however, suggested we started Tweeting. So I did... tentatively... feeling slightly insecure about my feeble lack of followers and wondering if anyone really wanted to hear from me that regularly.

And I started following others - individuals, companies, publications. Yes - its work, so I'm not getting hundreds of pub/holiday/friend related updates, which I would find irritating. The users I follow share really good research and opinions, so I'm reading far more stuff from a broader base of sources than I ever did before.

Twitter is a fantastic resource aggregator and this has taken me by surprise. It’s useful! I check it just as I check my favourite industry sites for news and updates.

I also have followers. Ok. Not many – yet. But despite my small group of followers so far I feel a deep obligation to become a useful resource to them too. 

Twitter has had an amazing role to play in some of the most significant world events in the last 5 years, from the US Presidential elections to the recent uprisings in the Middle East. It is a tool that in its simplicity is uniquely useful to us all. I'm a happy Tweeter.

Happy 5th Birthday Twitter!

Social media. Time for a reality check?

I deleted my Facebook account this week. Why? Because the novelty has worn off. Maybe I’m just not as interested in my friends as I should be. I have to admit none of them have noticed I’ve gone!

And I’ve been so uninspired by the brands I decided to follow that I found their too frequent updates irritating, and their pages didn’t offer me anything I wanted or needed.

Saying that, I have worked with some agencies recently that create really fabulous social media content for their clients. Maybe I just followed the wrong brands? But social media is still tactical at best rather than strategic and measures of success rarely leap beyond counting the number of followers.

A blog post by Saman Mansourpour sums this up quite well http://tinyurl.com/5txgzkk. He suggests that social media presence by brands is making life difficult for the consumers who have to wade through the rubbish to get to the content they want. So creatively it’s becoming increasingly difficult to stand out, meaning its time we took a more accountable strategic approach to meet advertisers objectives.

Tesco have taken the leap to a strategic presence on Facebook that will help support customer relations and bring unique offers to its followers. We will all be watching closely to see how this will be managed and evaluated. No doubt the followers will be there in volume, but how well customer interaction will be managed will be interesting for such a strong brand. How would posts about them hiring staff from Slovakia be dealt with for all to see?

Social media is really all about Facebook, and a bit of YouTube for the broadcastable stuff. And maybe Twitter… a bit. But with all this talk about social media it’s easy to forget that Facebook isn’t the internet. I keep seeing TV ads with the link to the brand’s Facebook page - and it concerns me. What happens if I’m not on Facebook? Do they have their own website too? Will it have the same content? Will I be rewarded for going direct to them rather than through Facebook?

Advertisers need to think about their products, their brand, and their target audience, and consider how they want their target audience to engage with that brand in the longer term.

We also really need to get to the bottom of attaching values to followers on social media. Its not enough to just be part of the conversation. Advertisers sell products. They need to know what part social media plays in this process, or if the product is already sold by the time they engage them.