And yet Twitter seems to get the most social media attention second to Facebook, right? Why?

Surprisingly it’s not because Lady Gaga tweets about her sex life, or because Coby posts pre-game comments. It’s because of what happened during the election in Iran, the earthquake in Haiti, the Tsunami in Japan, the killing of Bin Laden and, most recently, the many tornado warnings tweeted across the south. It’s because Twitter’s powerful ability to instantly deliver important information anywhere in the world is undeniable. And people are catching on. In fact, Twitter celebrated its fifth birthday on March 21 and announced that “While it took about 18 months to sign up the first 500,000 accounts, we now see close to 500,000 accounts created every day.”

How many of these new accounts will be made up of active users? Here are some recent new statistics:

1. Most new active Twitter users are 25-49, well educated, affluent, early adopters and tech savvy.

2. Most new active users engage in the environment daily, and are considered influential within their online world.

3. Most new active users follow companies and brands to learn about products and services and to offer advice, input and recommendations regarding them.

4. Most new active users (79% to be exact) are more likely to recommend brands they follow.

5. More new active users are conducting B2B business than B2C business.

Let’s focus on that last one. Why is B2B so popular in this environment? Maybe because tweets can be very targeted and relevant, creating reputations of knowledge and influence. Think of a tweet as a potentially powerful blog in 140 characters or less. Then think of how easily it can be spread (aka re-tweeted) as a recommendation. Worthwhile messages can go from one influential person’s following of 500 people to 500,000+ potential customers in a matter of minutes. Try getting those engagement numbers from a direct mail piece! And to top off Twitter’s B2B strength, remember that the more relevant the 140 characters are to a potential customer’s keyword searches, the higher the tweet post will show up in organic search results. This message content can enhance a business’ overall SEO. Not bad for a free communication tool, eh?

Twitter will most likely continue to morph into something no other social media resource can offer. It’s live search capabilities, along with its increasing credibility as something more than celebrity stalking, will no doubt add millions of new active users over the next year or so. With massive numbers of active Twitter users, you find untapped potential.

Time will tell. What do you think?

¹Stats from Hypebot

As more and more of us try to embrace these new methods of communication it quickly becomes clear that just when you think you have one thing down, a new technology is thrown into the mix that you feel you must learn and do your best to master.

Here’s the thing you need to know as a business trying to inform consumers about your brand: just because a technology exists, there’s no rule that says you have to use it.  Something that is a perfect fit for one business might be of little value to another. For instance, if your business relies on attracting retail customers then it might make sense to incentivize people to duke it out for the title of Foursquare “Mayor” of your location. However, if your business does not require customers to travel to your location, then this is of little value.  So, instead of trying to do it all and spreading your efforts too thin, take a step back and properly consider your goals and your message and figure out which tool or tools are the ones to achieve those goals. And remember, there’s nothing to stop you experimenting with new ideas in the future or adding to your marketing mix at any time.

Written By: Adria Higginson

1. Keep giving and contributing more than the competition. Pay back will be huge.
2. Every tweet, blog entry, comment and status update will be saved forever and is permanently part of your brand.
3. Before permission to market comes permission to connect. There’s a lot of trust building in between.
4. Make it easy for people to find you. While you’re out looking for business there is an entire market looking for you.
5. It’s not about B2B or B2C it’s about person to person marketing in social media.
6. Use the back links function in Google to see who is linking to your competitors. Reach out to those connectors.
7. Go wide with social media then build strong deep networks by going deep with the phone, Skype, webinars or in-person.
8. Twitter search and tools like Twellow.com can dampen the noise down from millions on voices to the exact ones you’re targeting.
9. Picking a fight publicly stays on record long after the battle is done. Rarely is it worth it.
10. Not getting the results you want? Are you asking for help often enough? It’s about community. Reach out.
11. Share and give more than you think is practical… then do it again. It will build positive momentum for your brand.
12. When partnering with other social media influencers start by making sure your values and principles are aligned.

Then again, how much would we have known abut the election in Iran? Or the Southern California wildfires last year? Or updates on the earthquake in Haiti?

Is there a place for a tool like Twitter? Absolutely. If, for nothing else, the amazing data it is gathering. People think Twitter is just a tool for Narcissists to express themselves. But meanwhile, it’s building one of the most amazing LIVE, SEARCHABLE data bases in history. That’s what its all about.

]]> http://www.brandtailers.com/what-is-the-future-of-twitter/feed 3 http://www.brandtailers.com/social-media-noise-trend-quality-over-quantity http://www.brandtailers.com/social-media-noise-trend-quality-over-quantity#comments Mon, 15 Feb 2010 00:51:48 +0000 Cheril Hendry http://www.brandtailers.com/?p=843 Read More]]> It’s getting very noisy out here in the online world. One billion uploads daily to YouTube, 2.5 billion active blogs, heck even the average person’s inbox gets over 100 non-spam emails daily.

So guess what’s happening? People are starting to turn off and tune out. Especially those who’ve been trying to figure out how to listen over the past two years, when the amount of online noise has increased ten-fold. Oh sure, Facebook is growing. But users are becoming much more selective about who they friend. Meanwhile other tools, like Twitter and Friend Feed, are seeing 20% of their subscribers making 80% of the noise.

In short, quality over quantity is the new trend.

This is good news for smart marketers. With the proper tools you can find your perfect customers and they’ll be able to hear you. You won’t be fighting the equivalent of 1,300 daily traditional media messages the average American didn’t ask to see but the advertisers still paid for. Marketers will get to enjoy quality over quantity too.

Let’s see what happens when the noise quiets down and people start using all these wonderful (yet currently loud) online tools more effectively. It should be the best time good marketers have ever had.

I’ve met many people lately who are unwilling to submit to their lack of social media knowledge. They have the “I don’t understand Twitter therefore it is a joke” mentality. How sad. They will be last in the unemployment line in a few years.

Oh, I’m no poster child for humility. I didn’t really get Twitter until about 9 months ago. I thought it was stupid. Now I’m busy playing catch-up. So I speak as an equally flawed human being, which is why I can attest to the fact that businesses must embrace the power of social media whether they really understand it or not.

My message of hope to you is that you are not alone – MOST PEOPLE DO NOT YET UNDERSTAND SOCIAL MEDIA. But you can no longer ignore its marketing power.

These days, with technology changing so quickly, most of us need to trust and rely on others who know more than we do about these new business tools. The sooner we find them, trust them, and let them help us, the sooner we’ll gladly have our picture taken in a Wonder Woman costume. I look forward to it.

Take a look and be sure to share with friends!

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My least favorite page on a website to write, but a very important one, as this blog entry explains. This also applies to writing your facebook or twitter profile page or any profile page, for that matter.

Link Building Tactics 101, Part 2

Second part of a series on building links. This one talks about writing articles and where to submit them, also some tips on using twitter for link building.

A Brief and Informal Twitter Etiquette Guide

Good info from Chris Brogan and his friends.

SEO? That Sounds Like Work

It is work. There isn’t a magic wand you can wave that will give you good results in the search engines. You have to have stuff on your site that people are looking for. Just like using social media for marketing. It’s easy if you have something worthwhile to give to people.

How Different Groups Spend Their Day

Very cool interactive graph of how american residents spent their time in 2008 from a survey of thousands of people.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve given web stats to a client and they’ve looked at the unique visitors number and asked me, “Is that a good amount?” It all depends. Compared to Amazon.com, probably not, but we’re not competing with Amazon. I’m relieved that most of the people writing about web analytics now admit that the page view & unique visitors numbers are meaningless on their own.

Here are a couple of other numbers you can safely ignore: Twitter Followers and Google Page Rank.

Twitter Followers

Twitter is the new, bright shiny object. Seems like everyone is on it and one of the numbers easily available for all to see is number of followers. Seems like more = better, right? Not really. What are you trying to do on Twitter? Are you trying to influence millions (perhaps start a new religion)? Then more followers is better. Are you doing research into who’s talking about your product? Then who cares who follows you. Are you trying to become an authoritative voice in your field (usually social media)? You need followers. Are you giving your company a presence where you can make announcements? Well, it might be nice if someone is listening, but Twitter is searchable, so those announcements will become part of the web.

PageRank

This one’s a little more obscure, but you’ll see it thrown around when talking about SEO. I’ve always been a big suspicious of it, but that may be because I tend to work with smaller websites. We rarely even show up on PageRank. What is it, you ask? It’s a way to measure a page’s popularity and authority on the web. A number created by Google that may reflect whether one site ranks higher on a search result than another site. Note that I said ‘may,’ as with everything with Google search algorithms, we’re all guessing here.

There is one time when  PageRank does matter: if you’re selling links from your site to others or getting links from other sites. The ‘juice’ those links have is probably affected by the site’s PageRank.

Other than that, it’s much more important to actually look at where your site ranks for your targeted keywords (as many  SEO experts have said and keep saying).

Oh, and by the way, it’s not called PageRank because it ranks pages, but because it’s named after Larry Page, at least according to the Wikipedia entry on PageRank.

Get out there and use it as yourself not your business. Seems obvious, right? But it’s an important distinction to make. The best way to learn how this stuff works is to use it like everyone else is using it: to communicate with your family, find long lost friends, follow your favorite band or sports team, don’t sign up and immediately start trying to use it to market your business, that can come later, once you understand how it works.

Let’s talk about Facebook and Twitter, two services that most everyone has heard about now, and I’ll use myself as an example. I’m a slightly different case than most people because I’ve been on the internet nearly as long as it’s been around, but all this social media stuff was just as new to me as it was to everyone else and I was a fairly reluctant participant.

I signed up on Facebook, found a few friends, wrote a few comments on my wall and kind of stalled out. Then I found a couple of old high school friends that I’d been out of touch with for years. That got me interested again. Now, I use Facebook to chat with those friends and follow what they are up to. Remember, you can put your photos up there, you can do every poll that your friends send you, you can play every game that comes along, or you can pass on all that.

Twitter’s a different beast all together (and a lot of people are trying to figure out what kind of beast it is). I follow a few of my friends that tweet; I follow my pro soccer team; I follow a few of the podcasters I listen to. Every once in awhile I tweet something, but not very often. Many people like the fact that they can have a conversation on twitter, I’m not on it often enough to do that, but I read some of the conversations of the people I follow.

So, get out there and get a Facebook account, play around with it a little. Go get a twitter account and see if any of your favorite celebrities or sports teams or authors are tweeting, follow them for a bit, see what you think. Remember, you don’t have to accept every friend request on Facebook and if you follow someone and they are inundating your twitter stream with inane chatter, stop following them.

Both services will walk you through getting started. When you write your profile, remember you’re writing about you, not about your business. Also remember that everything you’re writing is public, pretty much anyone can read it.