It’s difficult to underestimate Twitter’s importance in transforming the social space. But how is Twitter maturing, and how else is the micro blogger’s influence being seen?
Speaking at Social Media World Forum Bruce Daisley, Twitter UK sales director, explained that TV and advertising also benefits.
Given that the half-life of a tweet is between six and seven minutes, the key emphasis is on real-time changes, and as a result, it’s forcing brands to change their advertising game.
A good example of this was this tweet from Oreo during the Super Bowl blackout last month:
Daisley described this as “the discipline of real-time planning…what we’re seeing increasingly is that brands who can adapt to bringing their message live are really starting to benefit”. Yet it wasn’t all praise, as Slate.com described the incident as “the half decent tweet…that dazzled a nation”.
But, indirectly, Slate also emphasised that this wasn’t rocket science for brands. As a consequence, the virality and engagement Twitter provides means that the traditional advertising formula of spending time on a campaign and then delivering it is losing relevance.
Daisley also emphasised Twitter’s increasing relevance in the second screen sphere, with 40% of all tweets sent in the evening relate to television.
“The top trending topics, the majority of them have some commonality of experience,” Daisley explained. “Those shared moment that exist between people, they tend to be the things that spark.
“But what we see more and more is brands thinking of how they can take advantage of this.” Again, this leads to the conclusion that companies who don’t utilise real-time are missing out.
Another interesting facet of the presentation related to how companies should tweet. Taking a leaf out of Hellicar & Lewis’ book, Twitter put together a triangle, with ‘fun’, ‘info’, ‘help’ at the points with the phrase “choose only two” in the middle.
Examples of this were Innocent Smoothies, whose tweets hit on the ‘fun’ and ‘info’ categories, and O2, whose tweets hit were predominantly ‘fun’ and ‘help’, being an extension of the brand’s customer service arm – another useful function of Twitter.
Daisley cited research stating that of tweets that were rated most impactful, 24% were ‘funny’ whilst 48% had information going through the core – so proving that ‘fun’ wasn’t the only way brands could go.
“Brands are starting to use Twitter as principal outlet for customer service,” Daisley said. “For businesses that have a call centre business, the principal difference in operating it on Twitter and other social platforms [is that] the operators can use multiple customer service platforms at the same time…there’s definitely an economic benefit.”
Of course, it’s a truism to state how Twitter is moving beyond pure social networking, but are you experiencing the full benefits?
