77: Your Brand, Charlie Sheen, and President Obama

Several weeks ago, one of my college friends posted on Facebook that she had closed her Twitter account after not using it and not understanding what the appeal was.

Whether you’ve investigated Twitter or not, you may have the same impression: “What’s the big deal about Twitter? I don’t get it.”

With literally hundreds (if not thousands) of social media sites out there, it’s valid to question the importance of different environments. And it’s beneficial to explore the advantages and disadvantages of each. None of us have time for them all; so we must each determine why we use the sites we do and how to achieve the maximum benefit from them.

So, what about Twitter?

Let’s start with what Twitter is not. Twitter is not just text messaging the nation. Twitter is not just the playground of Charlie Sheen, teens, and Silicon Valley geeks. And Twitter is not Facebook or a direct Facebook competitor.

Evan Williams, co-founder of Twitter, told Hemispheres Inflight Magazine that Twitter and Facebook have different purposes. “We’re trying to deliver on the idea that Twitter has information about what’s going on in the world that you care about, and that’s different from Facebook’s value proposition, which is a way to stay in touch with people you know . . . I would describe it as a personalized news service. It gives up-to-date information on whatever you care about that’s happening in the world . . . We want people to understand that you don’t have to tweet to use Twitter, any more than you have to create a web page to use the web.”

If you only remember three words from that last paragraph, make them personalized news service. Twitter is an environment where people go to get quick snapshots of what interests them, be it international news, jokes from their favorite comedians, or the events in their friends’ respective days.

Mark Cuban titled a 2008 blog post, “If the news is that important, it will find me.” While there are multiple channels for news to get to us, Twitter is growing as a primary way that its users keep tabs on their surroundings. It’s certainly true in my life. I follow my local newspaper, CNN, ESPN, Wired, Wall Street Journal, and several tech blogs on Twitter and usually find hot headlines from these Twitter feeds before or in lieu of their more established formats. Twitter is both direct feed and word of mouth, rolled into one.

For the consumer, Twitter’s primary benefit is its shortcut to the world.

For the marketer, Twitter offers a chance for their brand to be a newsmaker. Whether you are posting informative links, company news, special offers, or customer service responses, Twitter helps you keep your brand in constant public awareness—without paying for advertising. Depending on the content in your posts (called “tweets”), Twitter can even help you establish an aura of expertise. If your tweets regularly contain links to helpful stories with specific market insight, you can build a public trust in your knowledge and experience base. This is important, because we all prefer in most situations to hire experts over general practitioners.

But doesn’t a Facebook business page accomplish many of these same objectives?

In many ways, yes. Twitter, though, streamlines a constant stream of outside knowledge (rather than that from social circles); so, you’ll find it easier there to collect, sort, process, and redistribute large amounts of information. Twitter is designed for a large quantity of posts; but it’s simplified for immediacy and geared for short encounters, since most of its users access their feeds through their mobile devices. Twitter’s text-based system is built for fast download with links for the people who want to expand a specific tweet beyond a quick thumb-scroll. Each tweet holds a maximum of 140 characters with which to entertain, converse, inform, or direct to more information.

So, Twitter favors the pithy, the succinct, and the connected.

And while most Twitter followers also own a Facebook account, the opposite is true of the percentage of Facebook users regularly engaging with a Twitter feed. In that way, Twitter offers a unique audience—typically a tech-savvy, culturally-connected one.

Over the past couple years, Facebook has incorporated popular Twitter features (like status mentions) into its system. And Facebook publishes its news on Twitter. If Facebook thinks it’s important to set up shop there, you might want to think about it, too.

If that’s not reason enough, know that a bunch of us use Twitter to post the things we hide from you and the rest of Facebook.
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For at least a decade, I found good news to be a watered-down synonym for gospel. I mean, good news can be anything from hearing your son is arriving home from Iraq tonight to learning that you can download a song you like for free on iTunes. Over the past few years, though, I’ve learned the weight inherent in this good news.

News isn’t history. News isn’t distant past. News is, “That just happened!” or “This is happening right now!”

If our view of the gospel is exclusively a historical list of verses in Romans, we fall short of its full intent and maybe even its power. In Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Acts, we are shown lives that explain the eternal significance of Jesus’ substitution AND that share what the Holy Spirit is blossoming in their lives.

We can sell our catechisms and doctrines to a secular culture, but they need to see an alive faith and how it impacts our current daily existence. That means we can’t just obtain our hell insurance and check our luggage all the way to heaven’s baggage claim. We have to be constantly changing, growing—becoming more alive. If the gospel isn’t constantly making news in those of us who’ve found its goodness, why would we expect it to be regularly making news in the lives we touch?

[footer]Photo credit for Twitter Bird Image.
Screen capture images purchased from iStockPhoto.com[/footer]

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