If By “Broadcast” You Mean “Share”
Thursday, April 23rd, 2009Then yes.
Earlier this week, Danielle Morrill and I gave a talk about Twitter to a group of entrepreneurs in Seattle. I wanted them to take away that the social value and the business value of Twitter went hand in hand. I also approach Twitter as a channel to find brand-evangelists, discover opportunities to help others, and share useful information. As a data nerd, I like to attach metrics to pretty much everything.
Some quick metrics to take away from Twitter include # of following to # of followers. The closer those numbers are to 1:1, the more likely it suggests reciprocal relationships, assuming that those you’re following are following you back and vice versa. DocuSign has nearly a 1:1 ratio of those it follows to those who follow it:
DocuSign's Twitter Metrics 368:374
Tweetstats, from Damon Cortesi, generates a lovely graph that tells you how many @replies you tweet (indicating conversation) and to whom you interact with the most.
DocuSign Replies ~ 61% of its tweets
In the Twitter Talk, one of the attendees said:
This is a way for me to broadcast what my company is doing
Um, share. Absolutely Twitter is a way to share what your company is doing. Why? Because people (potential customers, users, employees) care. However, they don’t care if your only interest is one way data flow. They want to know that the feedback they’re giving you is going somewhere, being considered, and possibly having an impact.
Twitter is a one-to-many content sharing application. It’s like having a back-and-forth conversation in a public space. You are having a directed conversation that is indexed by Google and then searchable.
Starting social media with listening, understanding what the audience wants/needs and then generating content gets you to…
PARTICIPATION
If you aren’t comfortable with putting out, you should start by listening. Integrate feedback into product development, messaging, customer service…
Listening alone creates value for business. Actually participating enables you to create and realize even more value.