Found: The Point of Twitter (Part 2)
Jason Lee Miller is a WebProNews editor and writer covering business and technology. You can read the full article here.
Search Engine Guide’s Jennifer Laycock referred to it as “acceptable eavesdropping.” From this perch, you can exercise a novel concept in marketing: listening. This is the difference between you and a spammer or spaghetti-against-the-wall message-pounder, always with his mouth open and his ears shut.
“Personally,” says Enquiro’s Gord Hotchkiss in a blog post on the difference between strategy and tactics, “I’ve felt that by providing glimpses into user behavior, I can help provide a lens to help see things from the outside in, an essential perspective for strategic evaluation. Part of any strategy in marketing always depends on gaining a deeper understanding of the common denominator, humans.”
So what’s the difference between a strategy and a tactic? A tactic would include actions like ones used by the aforementioned loud-mouth spammer, who, if we’re just talking Twitter, would either never be followed to begin with or would be unfollowed as soon as he betrayed a Twitterer’s trust. Or, it could include utility of the knowledge that Twitter, like Wikipedia, now ranks very well in Google’s search results.
Rocketboom’s Andrew Baron showed us this when he noted that only eight people ranked for “I got a call from eBay.” Sure enough, there’s more to it than the one freak occurrence. At Shoemoney, AJ Vaynerchuk shows how well Twitter users’ personal brands ranked in Google’s search results. Twitter profiles appeared on the first page almost without fail. Tactic: Establish a brand on Twitter, a site with high trust (the creator is a Googler, by the way), and you could establish some visibility in the SERPs.
What good does that do you? None if you don’t have something to offer. But it could fall into the greater strategy of connecting with people and building relationships. The deeper, harder to crack usefulness of Twitter is via the oft theorized but little focused on concept of permission-based marketing. Twitter followers and followees are in your network by choice, and if you’ve earned it, they’ll listen.
“It also gives you some insight into who companies and bloggers are as people; their likes, their dislikes, their personalities,” says Ms. Laycock. “This can be invaluable when it comes to putting together pitches and building relationships both inside and outside of your industry.”
Filed under: Webmasters
