|
Part of the problem is that Twitter is still struggling to monetize
itself.
At times even its own shareholders
seem foggy on how to do this. When
media and marketing managers adopt costly tactics that don’t work, the
board’s likely to notice pretty quickly. When they test out the cheap
or, for the moment at least, even free options that Twitter currently
supports, chances are they’ll either get credit for any unscheduled
success or good marks for trying when things don’t go to plan. There’s
no charge, no right, no wrong and so little risk.
Sad then, that when media and marketing experts like us are presented
with such a rare safe haven to experiment in we do so very little with
the opportunity. Here’s some big Twitter numbers (courtesy of
Malcolm Coles) that the national press in the UK would rather not
tweet about.
A
total of 131 national
UK
journalists have twitter accounts. Together, their tweets attract a
total of 1,076,512 followers. But out of 131 accounts, just 24 do
something other than running what you might call a glorified RSS feed.
The other 107 do no “re-tweeting”: they do not reply to other tweets. If
fact, across the entire spectrum of UK press, only six Twitter feeds
have more than 10,000 followers. The Guardian journalists are tweet
champs in the twitter world holding four out the top six most followed
tweets (The Times has one twitter account with more than 10,000
followers as does the FT). The red tops seem to be slowest at catching
on. Both the Sun and the Mirror claim few followers and seem reluctant
to promote their journalists' Twitter accounts on their pages.
In the few examples where journalists’ tweets do have a high numbers of
followers, evidence of genuine interaction with followers is also high,
but for the vast majority, tweeting would seem to be a one way form of
communication.
This situation is becoming the norm for many of us in media and
marketing. We tweet to tempt followers in, but we don’t do much
following ourselves. But what if we did? Consumer electronics giant
BestBuy is one of the first to seriously consider this option. From this
month,
the electronics retailer will start
searching Twitter posts to find
people seeking information about flat-panel televisions and other
electronic consumer items. It’s a tactic that promises to
really exploit the real-time search concept that Twitter’s developers are
on the cusp of monetizing.
Its user community may have grown out all proportion in recent months
but, for the moment at least, Twitter’s real commercial proposition to
marketers is all potential. The corporate costing model is still
evolving. This is not a situation that will last long. Already, Twitter
is contemplating access fees for companies seeking to mine users and
data flow, testing out a number of marketing-centric services and moving
towards verification for tweeting businesses. Put simply, it’s our duty
now, to pinpoint and exploit the real value that Twitter (and the
competitor services that will undoubtedly follow) can bring to our
marketing programmes before Twitter works it out for us.
For the most part, the tools and applications that we need to
incorporate really sophisticated real time-search and micro-blogging into our marketing game
plans are out there already - so why are so many of us waiting for Twitter
to tell us how we should play? |
