How to fall in love with Twitter in 5 easy steps
I did a presentation today on the power of Twitter as a marketing and communications tool – might as well blog it. Credits below
How to fall in love with Twitter in 5 easy steps
Step 1 – Introductions
Upon asking a room of 30 people to raise their hand if they’d heard of Twitter – most hands shot up in the air.
When asked to keep their hand up if they “get it” — or at least have some vague idea what Twitter is about — a good many hands went down, though not as many as predicted. We’re about half hands up, half down.
I then whittled it down to about 6 asking “who owns an account?” and 2 (myself included!) qualifying that with “…and use it often?”.
As things stand, unless you’re at SXSW or dConstruct that’s probably going to be typical: 5-10% of the room actively use Twitter, the rest not so much.
This presentation aims to tell that 90% that they’re late to the party.
Step 2 – getting acquainted
Most people are more familiar with Facebook; I would describe the Facebook status update as Twitter’s closest cousin.
When logged on, your Twitter home page asks you the question: “What are you doing?”; you have 140 characters in which to tell it.
This message is public (by default) so writing a Twitter (or “tweeting”) is like sending an SMS text message to the world.
Twitter provides a number of community features – you can “follow” other users, you can be followed and the content can be aggregated, syndicated and shared (more of which later).
Updates appear on each user’s profile page (mine is twitter.com/timboreader) but you can also subscribe and receive these via a variety of channels – email, text, rss, IM and so on.
My first brush with Twitter was when Richard was on a 6-month secondment in Singapore; this was his primary way of staying in touch with people. I’m ashamed to say I didn’t really get it.
In fact a lot of people don’t “get it” – and even when they do, they probably don’t “like it”. A typical reaction is “so what?”.
This is understandable given the predominantly inane applications of Twitter.
So what happens — what transformation occurs — to go from not getting it, not liking it to LOVING IT?
Step 3 – understanding
I guess the trick here is interpreting Twitter’s directive: “what are you doing?” to something that will suit you. We’ve all got something to share, whatever the motivation: personal gain, financial gain or pure selfless generosity.
It could be read as “what interests you?” or “what do you know that you want to share with others?”
Here are ways Futurelab aim to use Twitter in the future:
- publicise Research
- New publications
- Our tools
- 3rd party tools
- Call for participation
- Podcasts
- Events
- Outcomes of events
- Informally
- Network and name-drop
- Anything of interest
Twitter can aggregate and syndicate which is basically a way of saying it can be shared. The Futurelab site could use the feed from our own Twitter updates to power the About Us “what we’re doing” feature to make it more dynamic, responsive, current and collaborative.
Then there’s Twitter Search. Other users can search by keyword “Futurelab” or by our username “futurelabedu” or even by hash tags, maybe a tag someone has set up about an event – #bett09.
Hash tags operate in a similar way to other methods of tagging (flickr photos, your blog posts) but are incorporated into the Tweet rather than outside of it (thus unaltering the twitter model) using the hash symbol (#).
We’ve seen this used for BETT (#bett09) and TeachMeet (#tmbeet09) in only the last week. Not to mention #inaug09…
These get picked up by a community and followed consistently so it’s not inconceivable that next time we have an event we create our own tag #challenginglv (for the Challenging Learner Voice conference) and all tweets relating to that use the tag.
Monitter is a great tool for watching tweets in realtime, powered by Twitter search.
It is in fact last week’s activities that triggered this presentation. Between BETT, job ads and continuing interest in Exploratree and Million Futures: for the first time Futurelab monopolised the twitter search page, bumping off the Futurelab pretenders.
The response may still be “so what?” The vast majority of your audience probably aren’t on Twitter, so how can this be useful?
Step 4 – Spreading the love
Seth Godin said “Ideas that spread, win”. Twitter will spread because it’s viral. And because of that you only have to target the opinion leaders or the hubs. And guess what, those are the people – the early adopters who are using tools like Twitter.
Twitter’s power is in talking to people who talk. The hubs, the opinion leaders, the early adopters. Those with otaku.
If we are visible to influential people, they’ll make us visible to others.
It’s through those people that you get idea diffusion.
Some influential people on twitter: Barack Obama, 10 Downing Street, Stephen Fry – and many more in your industry.
(Some people disagree diametrically with this model saying that there are no “influentials” on the internet; the “nobodies” are now the somebodies because web has flattened and democratised information – the so-called non-influentials now have the influence. I think both models are useful)
Step 5 – fulfillment
If you want to see Twitter working for you, here’s some advice (we can go down the road together!):
- Get an account and get tweeting. Tweet stuff that will be of interest to people.
- Follow others and get followed
- Work out a strategy for use. What sort of stuff will you tweet? What will be your tone?
- Make it easy – have a twitter channel on your most used device: desktop, mobile, IM.
Communication Models diagram courtesy of Alun John, Marketing Tom
Categories: Web 2.0
