Having spent a reasonable amount of time researching the field of Social Media Marketing there is one product that almost always comes to the heart of any strategy involving Social Media. This product is Twitter. Now Dell claim to have made over $1 million through the use of the Twitter channel, an impressive uplift in sales from a new channel.
When it comes to leveraging Twitter as part of the Social Media policy there are of course a couple of questions that are asked:
- How does Twitter make money?
- What is the long term future of Twitter?
As I said in an earlier article Strategies for Leading Business Change & The Social Media Impact “The development of Social Media may have allowed us to reconnect with out old school and college friends but it also has the perspective to allow business development”. Twitter has so much potential and should be a part of any business social media strategy. In saying that It seems fair that the ‘service’ is subjected to the same questions that we would ask of any provider.
During the course of my career it has always been essential to ascertain the financial viability of any potential vendor. That viability includes an assessment of long term viability of the corporation. Such an assessment should be an important part of the selection process. So, when we ask these questions of Twitter the answers, unfortunately are quite bleak. That is not meant to criticise Twitter as a service,merely to question its financial stability and longevity.
Internet metrics about Twitter indicates that it is not sending much traffic to the more tradition commercial sites. Instead readers are being pointed in the direction of entertainment, social networking and blog sites. Actually this is the point – this media is democratising the web, even if the traditional advertisers like Coke and Ford do not like the impact of this. Thus leveraging Twitter as a channel for traditional forms of advertising is less predictable than for businesses in the new media space. This is one reason traditional advertisers may not be prepared to use the service for advertising, the other may be where the ads appear on such a busy screen.
Twitter has a lot of power as a search application – if you want to know what is being said about a specific topic use twitter search and you will be pointed to pages that may take day to ever appear in a Google search (and they may be ranked so low that they are effectively not found). However leveraging the right SEO technology a knowledgeable blogger can go straight to number 1 on the Google search. So a marketing policy that integrates Twitter would need to include an effective searchable message (that fits into 140 characters) which elevates the brand to the focus audience, and repeats the message in order to build a following.
So a corporation can certainly leverage Twitter as a part of its Social Media marketing effort, But we are still left with the question of the longevity of the service. A colleague recently asked “Does it matter if Twitter is still around in two years?”, in other words he is saying that we do not worry about its long-term future we simply leverage it here and now. I understand him, but would also argue that out of the 3,000 followers that I have built up on Twitter only about 100 of these do I have any way to connect with them outside the ‘Twitter-sphere’. Now it could be argued that these 100 are my key contacts on Twitter and I should not worry about the others. Yet I get personal messages about things that I have written from many outside that 100, let me guess that this comes to a further 200. So if the Twitter service terminates at that future time then I lose contact with these key set of 200 connections.
According to the chatter on Twitter there is corporate interest by both Google and Apple in this service. I am not convinced that any of that chatter is real or simply speculation, I feel the latter. For Google there are obvious advantages – as search can tap straight into one of the key information streams on the planet right now.
I would say that the long term future of any service used as a part of your business development does matter. It could also be argued that Twitter should be considered as a part of the infrastructure and Twitter, in becoming part of the way people communicate. It is because of this it needs to be protected. I find this argument has some credibility, but of course it has to be internationally protected and would probably be paid for by adding $1 to the cost of the average monthly internet bill for every user on the planet – then of course the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) would want to control how the product would be used and ensure their sponsors have a slice of the action.
So there are no easy answers here. I would love to hear your opinion about how we can secure a long term future for Twitter and how you see it fitting into the Social Media Marketing channel. I have my ideas and will be including future posts in the future.
