IAN CAHILL DOT COM

The use and misuse of Twitter?

Lately I have been following this girl on twitter. She works in PR and by all accounts spends most of her day blogging on various sites and of course immersing herself in social media.

What I find most interesting in observing her twitter feed, as well as spending a little time researching social media as it relates to business for a project at work, is her mix of personality and feelings with business targeted links to articles and blogs either written by herself or her peers.

This got me thinking. Social media can no longer be considered a new medium. Folks have been blogging and posting status updates for well over a decade. This girl I follow clearly gets paid to use twitter, but she has masterfully harnessed it’s power to not only push her business message, but to build a private following based on her personality. She has done this most likely through years of practice as a teen and twenty something traversing the web and its social pull. The funny thing is, is that corporate America is just now realizing within the past few years how powerful it can be. All the while still conflicted on it’s use in generating revenue.

But it isn’t just companies that are still figuring out ways to make social media sites like Twitter work for them, some consumers are struggling in the same ways. Another friend of mine maintains a twitter feed, but exclusively feeds off of it. I don’t think he has posted a single tweet. He just follows and reads content. While others, like Kanye West use it to project and push out their information to a massive following of people, following only a few other users and probably ignoring their tweets. So which is correct?

I have spent some time examining the reason why someone would post a tweet from a business perspective and it seems that offering a message, while important, might not be nearly as beneficial as engaging with other users. So while neither of the examples above are wrong, I think that in order to grasp the full depth of social media and it’s draw, you must do both. You must read and engage the poster with your own knowledge, effectively creating a community or message board spoken through short isolated bursts.

Twitter clearly realizes this as they make updates that allow users to track tweets that are joined through @ and RT forming conversations that span time and space. It is a neat idea when you think about it, but it does sort of take the public nature of the tweet and moves it more into private conversation. This is by no means a bad thing, maybe this will force businesses to become more personable. Maybe it will convince my friend to tweet more and maybe it will even cause Alyssa Milano to respond to my constant pleads of affection. You just never know until you try. So go forth and engage in twitterdom!

27 April 2011 ·