This weekend I was at Cadwell Park in Lincolnshire. The venue was host to the biggest motorsport property in the UK, the British Superbikes (BSB). The event was different, because as well as being supported by other motorbike classes, BSB hosted the Trofeo Abarth 500 GB, a new one-make car series. It could have all [...]
10 years ago I said that SMS text messaging would never take off. There were no t9 dictionaries to finish your words for you, no QWERTY touch keypads and at £374 per MB (using 5 pence per message) – it was incredibly expensive. Nevertheless, the technology was growing and growing fast, so we set about trying to come up with sms apps that would be useful for people and in doing so fell into the trap of thinking that people were like us.
I was reminded of this time yesterday as I tried to explain the virtues of Twitter to a ‘man in the street’.
I like Twitter. It appeals to parts of my personality, but as anyone who has tried to show someone else the platform will know – Twitter is not something that comes easily to most people. Unlike Facebook, which connects you to to long lost friends, Twitter has no immediate payback for most people.
There are huge barriers to entry that involve strange geeky etiquette around following and following back. To interact you need to learn a new set of text commands like putting @ in front of a username or # in front of a hastily thought up tag that might be one of several for a particular event. The Twitter site doesn’t actually give you much functionality so you have to make a choice between a set of online tools like Brizzly or downloadable apps like Twhirl. And all this for an activity that doesn’t scale because the human brain can’t follow 4765 conversations, so 90% of the stuff you want to listen to is lost because you have to sleep or you only scroll down the last 50 tweets or so.
While the self-appointed gurus try to sell interaction and conversation, the benefits of Twitter for most people don’t even require an account. You can search Twitter and follow trends and breaking stories using something like TweetGrid or even an RSS feed and changes to Google and Bing will return Twitter results. It’s hard to track conversational threads and many Tweets link back to blogs that have the ability to comment in more than 140 characters.
In other words, there will be a lot more consumers of Twitter than users. Think about it, there are a lot more people who see Google Ads than place them.
So what does that mean for businesses and brands?
While Twitter is becoming increasingly important as a way of influencing a certain type of customer, most of your customers have never heard of it and almost all of them don’t use it. An increasing number will consume your Tweets or ‘Follow’ you, and a small amount will use the reply mechanism. The best that you can hope for is to be engaging. Engagement is not the same as interaction. Those you interact with will be a tiny proportion of your customer base, but how you interact with them is extremely important.
In other words, you need to understand your audience. You need to know who they are, where they are and how they would prefer to communicate with you. If you want to be engaging you need to be relevant. If you are lucky enough to be invited into a customer’s digital life, then it is probably because you have done some old fashioned brand building or got your product right. The fundamentals will work across any platform – including Twitter.
Tags: Branding, Business, fundamentals, Marketing, relevance, Twitter
