Twitter.
Everyone is talking about it these days.
What is it? Ways a company should use it. Even why companies should not tweet.
Friday, it truly entered the mainstream..
Oprah has entered the Twitterverse.
Even before her first tweet, Oprah had more than 73,000 followers. Hours later, that number has nearly doubled. Twitter itself has been experiencing phenomenal membership growth.
So people are asking…
Will this be the demise of Twitter?
I don’t think Twitter is going away any time soon. People will just change how they interact with it.
Even though I don’t follow hundreds of people, I sometimes get overwhelmed with the number of tweets I go through daily. There is a lot of noise out there. Once the ‘Oprah Effect’ fully takes its course, the noise will be exponential.
I’m sure there will be more and more ways for customizing and filtering tweets for people to get through the noise. (Just look how RSS has done that for other types of content.)
That’s only part of the equation of filtering the noise.
The other part…reputation.
One of the people I follow Twitter regularly adds value and tweets about product experiences, movies, events, music, and other things that are interesting and/or helpful. This person captures my attention. I typically will read every tweet this person writes.
One the other hand, one of my other friends on Twitter writes mostly about what they had for breakfast/lunch/dinner (or other things that add no value). After reading their tweets over the past few weeks, I now skip reading their tweets
(even though technically I’m still a ‘follower’).
Reading tweets on my phone, I use this simple filtering system:
People who regularly write interesting tweets = Pay attention.
People who don’t = Skip/Ignore.
I’m sure a lot of you do exactly the same thing.
The reason I mention it is that it illustrates why just joining the conversation is not enough. It’s about adding value to the market conversation.
Companies that listen to what’s being said, contribute with (non-marketing-speak) content that people want to respond to, comment and share their views will build a strong reputation – breaking through the increasing noise. This will also enhance their relationship with their prospects and customers and help position them as a quality participant in the market conversation.
In doing all this… companies will actually be able to reap the benefits of the upcoming ‘Oprah Effect’.
