Fishburn Hedges

18.11.2011

This week, an excellent article by Bill Gurley argued against the common perception of Twitter as a mere “social network” – that it should be seen as a “discovery platform”, a newsfeed that is “human-curated by a potential universe of millions of curators”.

Much of the article rings true. It claims that “Twitter points out to the world. It’s a ‘discovery engine’ and an ‘information utility’ rolled into one. With Twitter, you get news faster, you see updates from your favorite artists, you hear directly from key politicians, and gain insights from influencers in a wide variety of specializations.” All of this is of course right, but it misses a key point – Twitter is also without any doubt a social network, it’s just a very externalised and public one.  Stats show that 27% of tweets are private messages, and 30% are the user’s current status – both much more comparable to Facebook-esque activity than Mr Gurley suggests. Only 10% link to news articles, 3% are links to other web content, and 3% are links to images or videos. This isn’t just a window on the world – this is social networking in its traditional sense. The “social” is at least as important as the “discovery”. 

Where Twitter is unique is its combination of a social network and a discovery engine, to a point where the two have become indistinguishable. Conversations between celebrities that once would have been private are now public, and are in some cases news. Twitter doesn’t just allow you to “see updates from your favourite artists”, it allows you to message them, to (if lucky) get a response, resulting in a much greater connection to the artist than before. It lets you complain about poor service from a brand, and in many cases get a much faster and more effective response than by sitting on hold to a call centre.

What does this mean for communications, and brands in particular? I’ll quickly pick three things. Feel free to add your own underneath.

1)    Twitter – more than Facebook or any other social network - has forced an entire generation of brands to “humanise” – not just by talking about themselves in the first person, but by talking to their audience in a completely different way – which in a lot of cases means not talking about themselves very much at all.

2)    Most brands have now realised that using Twitter as solely a channel for sharing news isn’t an option. Twitter accounts typically index high within Google searches for a brand, meaning consumers will flock to Twitter rather than a corporate website when they have an issue. Some brands have addressed this to the point where Twitter is now primarily a channel for customer service, with little ‘marketing’ – and certainly no links to bland corporate press releases. In the debate about which marketing speciality is best placed to lead your social media profile, the answer may be “none of them”.

3)    However, it isn’t all doom and gloom for marketers. When used well, where the brand is responding to questions and complaints, talking the audience’s language and inspiring them to engage, it gives it a hugely powerful channel for spreading some “brand love” to what can be a huge volume of followers. Brands that recognise that, first and foremost, Twitter is not about them, it’s about discovery and sociability, stand to gain the most from the channel.

Posted by Charlie Howard

Visit our Media and Government microsite for more discussion