Twitter: part of the conversation
August 21st, 2009 by Lloyd Gofton
In terms of brand communications, Twitter has been the hot topic for longer than we all care to remember. The doubters and supporters both offer good arguments, but what’s the truth about Twitter and why should you care?
In the last few months we’ve seen headlines such as: ‘Just 10% of Twitter users generate more than 90% of the content’, from a Harvard study of 300,000 users, and more recently, social media revolution is going nowhere from the Telegraph and 40% of tweets are “pointless babble”, which came from Pear Analytics who captured 2,000 tweets over the course of two weeks and catagorised them.
Interestingly, the rest of the stats from the Pear analysis were a little more revealing: 37.5% of tweets were conversational and 8.7% had pass-along value, 5.85% were self promotion and 3.75% was spam.
So, very nearly the same amount of tweets that grabbed the headline were in fact conversational, and here is the point Ladies and Gentleman; Twitter is all about the conversation. Conversation between individuals, groups, networks, brands, whoever. Twitter is a conversation engine.
So why the doubters? The point that many are missing is that Twitter is not the answer to every communications issue. It’s not going to change the world, and it will eventually be replaced by new social platforms, but that doesn’t make it any less valuable now.
Furthermore, not all Twitter users will be relevant to you, your brand, your conversation, just as not every person at an event is relevant to you, your brand or your conversation. Some people use Twitter for fun, some use it to stay in touch with their network, and some use it as a sales tool, but at Twitter’s core is a group of highly motivated, well-networked, socially-astute communicators that use Twitter to listen, discuss, converse and yes sometimes self-promote and babble as well.
The problem for many doubters seems to be that they simply don’t get it, and drop out pretty much straight away. Nielsen reported that Twitter was hemorrhaging users in April as 60 percent of new users leave the service within a month.
Many of these people seem to dip in, expect everything and receive nothing. That’s because as with any form of conversation, you have to work at Twitter to get a return. You have to identify your community, listen, add value to the conversation and build your reputation to succeed. Not everybody is willing to put that time in.
When the time is put in, the rewards include open conversation with your communities, direct access to authorities that you would never have been able to reach previously, learning, news, opportunities, sharing ideas and much more than I have the room to list here.
Yes, you may also find out when somebody missed a train, or lost their phone, but isn’t that all part of the conversation?
Tags: Social media, Social networking, twitter
