As Twitter continues to become more and more mainstream it seems everyone now has opinion on what Twitter is and how it should work. It seems to have been in the Daily Telegraph every day of the last fortnight. Anyway, I have just read another brilliant post from Dave Fleet on what Twitter is not.
Mr Fleet states it isn’t:
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Essential to every company’s success, or right for every company;
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Mandatory for every company out there
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The first thing you should do online;
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Going to turn around your bad business model;
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Going to fix your shoddy product;
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A silver bullet for your customer service issues;
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Used or read by the majority (just ~6 million in total… consider there are 300+ over 500 million
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A replacement for other communications/social media tactics (think AND, not OR);
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A staple requirement in every communications strategy;
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The same thing to everyone.
Now this makes real sense. Twitter is not the be all and end all of new marketing tools. It is simply a new channel which is great to share information and have dialogue with friends, peers and colleagues. If it is used correctly with other elements of social media it can be fun and useful but if it is used wrongly it can begin to irritate people.
I have a few others to add to Dave’s list, Twitter is also not:
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A one way communication tool – celebrities please take note
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The newest route for PR people to transmit their news releases to a wider public
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A competition to see who has the most followers
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A blatant selling tool – no actually I don’t want to hear about your latest great cheap, amazing, fascinating, brilliant deals for compost
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A great way to find people who have the same surname as you – lol
If you are looking to use Twitter, one piece of advice I would give is install Tweetdeck as it is a fantastic tool which helps you to see all of your conversations much, much easier. How is that for a bit of word-of-mouth?
