The love affair with Twitter just keeps growing and growing. The fundamental benefits of Twitter for brands has not changed much since we published our workshop, Twitter for Business. We have seen a lot more brands experimenting and, of course, celebrities jumping on board. Last week, when @Oprah jumped in, I coudl feel the collective groan as the servers coped with the onslaught. And, of course, there was Ashton Kushter's 'million-follower-goal.' (see his Tweedeck demo here)
Four Winning Qualities of Twitter
There are four qualities to Twitter that make it appealing to brands to adopt in their social media mix. these same three qualities continue to postion Twitter against other platforms including Facebook:
It's simple - while there are many ways you can apply Twitter to your business from customer service to listening intelligence to extending offers to drive conversion, it is all built upon a dead simple model of followers, following and 140 character messages. You deliver something of value and you accrue followers. Followers retweet and act on messages.
It's open - Anyone can read my tweets. You only have to register or login to post your own or interact. Not only that but it is very easy to pump your feed anywhere you want. Many brands are now including their Twitter feed(s) as part of their Social Web presence in their corporate or brand "home" pages (there's a concept - "homepage" - that has been blown up over the past coupel of years). Also, the API of twitter is fairly available and many are creating some interesting visualizations and aggregations of data.
It's got a good ear to the ground - many brands have discovered the value of putting their brand in Tweetscan or just seraching Twitter, itself to find a lot of surprising mentions. Some clients are now using Twitter as a kind of proxy listening post, using it as a barometer of likely overall issues. All of our clients have added Twitter to their cgm listening posts. I knwo one client who did their social media ROI plan simply based on Twitter mentions alone.
It's free - One could argue that you don't have to pay to use Facebook either yet clearly the value of facebook is only realized with some crafty and stategic use of advertising around brand pages or applications to make your needle stand out in the haystack. (Conspiracy theory #1: Does Facebook resist improving inside-Facebook search to increase teh importance of paid advertising to discover anything in there?). Twitter won't always be free but I suspect that whatever business model they adopt will make it easy for brands to pay 'X' to use such a simple system.
So What About Facebook?
It's complex - from Brand pages to Facebook Connect to applications to social ads, there's a lot you can do with Facebook. This complexity is a hurdle to some brands while it also promises more power for those who do get involved in really using Facebook.You can see that power - hopefully simplified - in our recentFacebook Bootcamp preso here.
It's not so open - exporting data from Facebook is pretty much not possible. They want to control that. Imagine crafting a cool visualization of the biggest brand communities by using the Facebook API. I just don't think it could happen.
It's hard to detect what people are saying inside Facebook. At 200m users, everyone wants to extend their Listening Post into Facebook (yes, in a a way that is not eavesdroppy). What do we get? Facebook Lexicon which is like BlogPulse was years ago. I hope that someone inside Facebook is making listening tools a priority. One of the benefits of the type of critical mass and reach they have is the ability to knwo what's going on in there.
It ain't really free - the most impactful cases of brands using Facebook involes paid ad campaigns within Facebook. That's how they earn their revenue but it's also how you boost awareness fo whatever it is that you are doing in there. Still, to create eficient ad programs, you need to plan in a more complex way - what is your engagement and conversion model; how will you target? what is the balance of paid vs. "earned" WOM inside Facebook. Early advertisers inside teh social networks may have approached it as a simple channel and been disappointed with the results. Truth is - advertising helps social media scale - IF IT IS DONE IN SERVICE OF THE COMMUNITY AND CONVERSATION.
I am guessing that the most sophisticated marketers will continue to leverage Twitter while at the same time dive deeper into their use of Facebook with all it's complexity.
Great article and I think from my observations Twitter has excelled for all the reasons shown above, making it a superb tool for businesses and individuals to research and collaborate with their customers.
This is also true of Facebook, but with the feel of a retail space: a place where individuals can relax, catch-up with friends and learn more about their favourite brands. Where as Twitter does exactly that, but shared with more business-to-business activity and expert exchange to deliver what feels a more powerful message to consumers and partners.
Posted by: Andrew Thomas | April 20, 2009 at 03:52 PM
The need to understand their customers better is one of the top CMO needs in this time of crisis because customer retention is key. Social media is seen as one way to to that (salesforce.com integrating twitter is a good example of how the info available is social media is making it's way to the heart of the enterprise)
I think the best combination is twitter + blogs. Twitter for the real time interaction/relationship management and blogs for the longer term/deeper interaction /relationship management.
Posted by: laurent | April 20, 2009 at 04:30 PM
@andrew thomas and @laurent - agree with both of you. Your associating of Facebook and "retail space" is timely based upon some social shopping trends that are happening and things we are working on. The role that Twitter plays amidst all of the tools/platforms available - e.g. your Twitter + blogs mention - is where it is used strongest. Said another way - having a strategy that uses platforms for what they are great at and uses them together is where it's at....
Posted by: John Bell | April 24, 2009 at 08:20 AM