Why twitter is the king of new social media (Part 1): not Facebook
Posted in Twitter Monetizing Strategy, Twitter intro, Web Marketing Strategies on April 8th, 2009 by 2above – View CommentsI hope by now you get a chance to read Whit’s “twitter rant” and start wondering: am I for twitter, or am I against twitter?
Whit and lot of people think twitter.com is a fad because “no one is busy with tweeting, no one is paying attention to what others are tweeting about” and soon “it will end up like a big pile of crap no one can do anything about but forgetting”.
Read this: Twitter is supposed to be full of “crap”, the more crap there is on twitter, the more valuable twitter.com will become.
Imagine there is no twitter.com, people still chat/talk: popular people talk on the phone with friends/family all the time, lonely people talk in their head. All these talk are gone disappeared after “talk” is done.
Twitter.com lets people tweet in short message, which resembles the most basic human behavior: random chitchat, small talk, daydreaming. Although twitter.com insists it’s a great tool to connect with your friends in a more intimate/closer setting, it’s actually being adopted by millions people for other purposes: random chitchat, small talk, daydreaming, stay on top of News.
It’s not important for people to read all the tweets, the good ones will surface for different individuals and each person can have his/her own favorite few. 99% of tweets are supposed to be random crap that will instantly get lost. How often do people write down their phone conversation, their random chitchat, small talk, daydreaming: not often. But people still have to turn their thoughts/chitchat/small talk/day dreaming into action of pursuing something, buying something, doing something. Conventionally, marketers are able to identify people’s needs based on their experiences, seasonality, understanding of people, sometimes, guessing. With Internet/Google/Yahoo came the much better transparency from the historical data, which enables digital marketers to capitalize on. When Facebook came along, social media breaks down the inter-personal barrier, all of sudden everyone is connected with everyone. But Wait, Facebook does not provide better than what Google does: the historical data. Facebook only “invades” more on our privacy and force people into a more social animal than they are supposed to be. Readwriteweb calls “Facebook is a cult”, Facebook does not really provide anything more than smart sustainable marketers don’t already know. Yes, I have listed my favorite movies/hobbies on Facebook, but they don’t represent my real time needs, like AT ALL. Many marketers have been trying Facebook “contextual ads” for ages without success. I am one of them: running contextual ads for ages without seeing ROI. The “valuable information” on Facebook now became “crap”.
With Twitter.com, all of sudden, people start writing down their random chitchat, small talk, daydreaming. I tweet about the nice raincoats that bunch of random women wear at a street corner near my apartment while it was raining and I wanted to know where I can get that raincoat (for my gf). You maybe twittering about the shopping trip you must do afterwork. All in real time!
Yes, I admit all these tweets are trivial, worthless to our friends and no one wants to see. But that is besides the point. The smart sustainable marketers in the social media era that is beyond Google/Yahoo will need to mine the real time twitter.com. That is when crap becomes gold. That is why visionary people start treating twitter.com as a real time search engine. That is why Google is drooling over twitter.com.
That is exactly why Twitter will be the king of new social media marketing.
Twitter It!