PBS Report Helps With Ways to Use Twitter
The “PBS NewsHour” ran an interesting story about Twitter last night. The five year-old company has gone from eight employees when it started to almost 500 today and projects to 3,000 within two years. They are about to renovate a large San Francisco building for all these new people to move into
Twitter figured prominently at last week’s SIPA 2011 Conference with two large “Twitter walls.” Tweets rolled through like the ticker on the stock exchange. Luis Hernandez from Thompson wrote, “Of course we need Web writers, but knowledgeable content curators are just as important. Some orgs have both!” Torry Burdick from Mortgage Success Source tweeted, “Ossoff: our industry will survive by producing practical, useful and accessible information.” Lexie Gross from BVR asked, “how to sell content – opportunistic vs. proactive; what content do your customers want?”
So it looks like we’re beyond the point of asking if you need to be there. You do. (The number of tweets sent per day has now reached 155 million.) But how? Here are 11 interesting ways that I gathered from the NewsHour story:
– Think of it as a search engine. “It is a search engine, in that it’s a real-time way of finding out what’s going on about what you care about and about a specific topic, too,” said Kevin Cheng, a Twitter product manager. (Anyone who attended SIPA 2011 knows about the importance of real-time.)
– Follow a conference. Said NewsHour correspondent Spencer Michels: “For example, if there’s a conference you can’t attend, there’s a decent chance someone is tweeting about it.” Probably more than decent now.
– Find out what people are talking about. “Users seek out trends, specific popular topics they’re interested in, and find out what other users are saying,” said Michels. “And that information can be sold to firms trying to sell something.”
– Gather market research. “Marketers ultimately see the platform as a huge public opinion or market research vehicle,” said Adam Bain, Twitter’s revenue specialist. “They’re looking for what people are saying about products, services, categories.”
– Deliver information to a current audience. Said Michels: “At the ballpark, fans of the San Francisco Giants receive continuous tweets from the team’s social media director.
– Give information for people to find your product. “In the streets of the Bay Area, Twitter and other sites that connect with Twitter are the way people find a fleet of food trucks, including Fiveten Burger,” Michels said. “The customers are alerted to the truck’s location by tweets sent out by the cook and truck owner Roland Robles, who uses his phone to say where he is. He has 700 people who get his tweets, or as they say, who follow him.”
– Customers can feel more connected to your writers/analysts. “I like that you can keep in touch with people that you wouldn’t normally have access to, like, you know, either celebrities or entertainers,” said William Paoli.
– Put your information out there and let customers decide what they want and when. “I follow now almost 1,000 different accounts,” said Cheng. “And I don’t expect to read all of them, right? I think of it more like a stream that I dip my feet into every so often.”
– The 140-character limit forces you to be brief and to the point.
– It works for all platforms. “The 140-character maximum is just below the international limit on text messages for mobile phones, so they can be used everywhere.”
– Get in now to start learning what works best. “The truth is we’re only about one percent into the journey that will become Twitter,” said co-founder Biz Stone. “We’re a very young company in the grand scheme of things.”
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