Thought Leaders on Twitter

Thought Leadership Times Blog (Oct 13 2009)

  1. Thought Leaders on Twitter

    An astute marketing professional shared with me that she was tired of hearing all the Twitter talk and of attending social media seminars with “professionals” gushing about Social Media and their poster-child for success, Twitter.  “Twitter is as narcissist as you can get.  Where’s the ROI in that?”  Today, I’ll provide two points explaining why I believe thought leaders can be found on Twitter and why these thought leaders will secure increasing customer attention, in this medium.  I’ll also conclude with some ideas on how you too can be a thought leader on Twitter.

    In 2007, Twitter burst onto the scene at the SXSWi Conference, and became an easy way to connect with people in your network or to just have fun letting strangers know voyeur your life, every time you felt the urge to share.  Heading into 2010, the tweet-terrain has changed substantially.  Twitter traffic has increased immensely and continues to grow as more people and corporations become aware of it as a marketing channel.  Increasing Twitter popularity has a positive, reinforcing, network effect.  Thus use cases for Twitter have expanded that companies and brands now use Twitter to keep their customers updated, in real-time.  When your customers are mentioning your brand on Twitter, which brand manager wants to be out of that discussion? 

    Twitter is the new industry standard for customer contact and prospect engagement of innovative organizations.  Corporations that still do not have blog posts have quickly placed Twitter follow-me links where customer and clients can receive up-to-date information.  Will Twitter surpass blogging as a corporate standard for engaging customers?  I think so.  Why?  140 characters are much easier and faster to read than 140 words.  Tweets are also much easier to produce than 140 pages. 

    There is a unique opportunity to connect with customers via this new standard and it may even cost less than blogging. Search the Thought Leadership Times article archive and you will find a number of blog pieces and case-studies on successful tweet marketing efforts, with ROI measurements and other metrics.  Bear in mind, the standard goes beyond marketing.  Human Resources practices are also changing with Twitter.  At Marketing Sherpa 2009, Mike Volpe of HubSpot mentioned that he hired two new, quality employees from Twitter.  Twitter thought leaders use tweets even beyond customer engagement and as a channel to find new talent.

    Search Engine indexed tweets help your brand get found. Tweets are now indexed by multiple companies, including Google.  As of this writing, Twitter, Google and Microsoft are exploring final talks to let the major search engines index the Twitter stream.  However, tweets are already currently indexed by a number of companies seeking to help people capture real-time search sentiment.  Companies such as Crimson Hexagon, Topsy, Almost and Scoopler are already racing to index tweets and make it easy to learn the sentiment of twitter-stream.

    Today, I Googled “Taariq Lewis” and found that my own Market Influence Twitter account was more highly ranked than my 2 other personal Twitter accounts.  Those other accounts have more followers and more tweets, yet a lower search page rank.  Why?  This simple experiment informs me that highly relevant tweets may increase visibility in search engine results.  Further testing is needed.  However, any marketing executive spending money on Google Adwords should be sensitive to how keywords in tweets will impact Google organic search results.

    Twitter thought leaders deliver original, relevant tweets for customers and employees that are proactive and not always reactive.  Some companies may never get pass the: “We apologize for our service being down, please bear with us as we fix the problem” tweet.  These organizations will be limited to Twitter as a customer-reaction channel. 

    Twitter thought leaders treat Twitter as a new engagement and resource to share “real-time” insights that all industry constituents value.  Twitter allows us to interrupt our community with valuable information.  At HiveFire, we’ve noticed that click-through rates on tweets are highest when the content is highly relevant, insightful, and timely.  Those brands that are able to harness their tweets to deliver such value to their client and prospects will benefit.  Not only will these brands increase mindshare, but they will increase their brand authority online.

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