When it comes to using Twitter for business, I am generally skeptical. There are a few, narrow areas where Twitter makes sense, but for most businesses, it seems the only real purpose of Twitter is branding and customer service — i.e., to make sure people aren’t saying nasty things about you, and to pass along nice comments.
Despite suffering from a kind of generalized, wordless loathing of Twitter, I’ve been reading a little about it and giving it a try recently, just to see how it all works. Here are my observations. (If you’re looking for expert commentary and “best practices” advice, this isn’t it.)
The first thing that strikes me about Twitter is you have to decide if you’re going to be outrageous or not. A lot of the folks who get a large Twitter following seem to have decided that being a comical (or angry) exaggeration of a real human being is the ticket to success.
That makes some sense. “The dark secret that’s threatening your children” will get you to tune in at 7:00 for the details, while “7:00 and all’s well” won’t. Being dramatic on social media is somewhat parallel to “bad news sells.”
Twitter is the realm of mock, opinion, insult, snark and whatever the proper form of “snide” would be in that list. (“Snit”?)
So the path to success for actors, comedians, pundits and agitators of all sorts seems relatively plain. But … what if you want to be a serious person? Is there a place in this social madness for something else?
I found this quote helpful.
In A Social Strategy, [Piskorski] contends that the real world comes with certain social norms of conduct that keep people from saying what they really want to say, or acting how they really want to act. Successful social media platforms let us bend those rules. In short, unacceptable behavior in the offline world might be perfectly acceptable in the online world.
I don’t think he means you have carte blanche to be an ass. He means, for example, that LinkedIn lets you passively look for jobs while pretending you’re just being professional, and Facebook allows you to be nosy without consequence.
The article is worth your time. See Secrets to a Successful Social Media Strategy
The lesson would seem to be that social media success depends on allowing people to safely indulge their vices … just a little. I’m not exactly sure how to apply that to publishing, or to my own personal attempts in the Twitterverse, but it seems like something to keep in mind.
This is a lot more helpful to me.
The Secret to Social Media Success in 10 Easy Steps lays out a very calculated approach that seems consistent with other things I’ve learned in the publishing business. E.g.,
- What are you trying to do, for whom;
- position yourself accordingly;
- create relevant content;
- learn the optimization tricks;
- don’t forget the basics;
- find influencers, etc.
That resonates with me, but here’s the thing that keeps tripping me up. What if you have multiple interests?
If you’re willing to limit your Twitter persona to a particular thing, the “secrets” article just cited seems right. Find the audience, give them what they want, etc. It’s pretty straight-forward, but it seems to require a single focal point.
It seems harder if you have multiple areas of interest — unless, that is, you’re the type that can create a personality cult around yourself.
Some Twitter characters create such an interesting persona that people want to follow them simply because … they’re interesting. Their followers want to hear about all this person’s interests in the same way that fans of actors want to hear about all the personal details of the actor’s life.
Personally I find that slightly creepy, but I’m not here to judge anybody.
Taken all in all, the conclusion I’m talking myself into is that if you want to have a successful Twitter strategy you have to make a choice. You can either be the fabulous character that people want to follow because you’re just so doggone interesting, or you have to pick a subject and generally stick to it, following something like the “10 Steps” approach in the article above.
Agree?