The Disappearing Twitter Account

Thought Leadership Times Blog (Oct 20 2009)

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   It's a very common phenomenon.  Someone creates an account on Twitter, excitedly tweets about the days' activities for a few weeks, and then loses interest in the social media outlet. The tweets become less and less frequent.  It even happens to the heads of multimillion dollar operations.  Bo Pelini, the head coach of the University of Nebraska football team, created his Twitter account in May 2009 to much fanfare.  The University put out a press release announcing the event, and the account was quickly followed by 10,000 people.
   
   In the first month, Pelini sent out 40 tweets.  Over the course of the next month, he sent out one.
   
   Why did the tweets stop appearing?  Trying to connect with people through social media can be exhausting.  Once the novelty of the platform wears off, a company or representative left with the task of creating content can be quickly worn out.  The same thing can happen when trying to use social media and the web to build thought leadership.
   

   The reason is that thought leadership demands persistence.  It is impossible to become a thought leader overnight.  It might take months or years to be viewed as a thought leader in an industry.  For one thing, any online publication starts at the bottom of the search result ladder.  It takes time for the search engines to start scoring a website highly enough to become visible to content consumers.

   Another issue is building reader trust.  It will take many visits for the reader to trust the validity, neutrality, and usefulness of the content published by the company.
   
   Throughout this time, the company will need to constantly create new content to keep the audience engaged.  If this means writing original blog entries every few days, the burden on the site maintainer is substantial.

   While this effort needs to be maintained to be successful, there are ways to lighten the load. Outsourcing is one way of generating new content quickly, and with less hassle.  By having ghostwriters prepare the blog entries, more time is freed up to properly promote the thought leadership website, and other job demands each day.
   
   Other tools are designed to help bring in new content from other sources to display alongside the original content.  In this way, the site can look fresh and relevant, even if there isn't enough time to create new content.  HiveFire (my company) provides a tool that helps bring in new external content, and publishes the original and external content online.  Zemanta is a tool that can suggest related content when publishing an original article.  This is a way of providing context to a blog entry, and more content for the reader to consume.
   
   Thought leadership is not something that can be built overnight.  It can be done, but it demands persistence. The right tools can take much of the burden off of the maintainer.  With a little effort, most companies can engage readers by providing interesting, useful, and neutral content, without being overwhelmed by the work involved.
   
   
   

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