Of all the social media platforms, Twitter is the one that puzzles marketers the most. The typical observation is that they don’t get it and can’t figure out why it’s important.
EMarketer shared some research recently from ExactTarget that provides an easy answer: Twitter gives you a way to reach people who have loud and active voices online. Once you’ve gotten their attention around your message, you’ve got a good chance that they will redistribute that message somewhere on the web.
How’s that work? ExactTarget shows that the 26 million monthly users of Twitter are three to five times more likely to comment on blogs, post to forums, participate in view sites and blog themselves than the average Internet user.
“Consumers active on Twitter are clearly the most influential online,” said Morgan Stewart, principal at ExactTarget’s research and education group, in a statement. “What happens on Twitter doesn’t stay on Twitter. While the number of active Twitter users is less than Facebook or email, the concentration of highly engaged and influential content creators is unrivaled—it’s become the gathering place for content creators whose influence spills over into every other corner of the internet.”
The conclusions suggest that the time spent investing in an audience on Twitter is likely to have an exponential impact. This is the crux of social media marketing, and provides a simple justification for using a service that at first seems fragmented and chaotic.
Take 5 minutes to watch the following video. [If you already know about www.wheresgeorge.com skip ahead to the 2:00 mark.]
The video is more than a curiosity. For those of us involved in social media and social networking it’s got some interesting implications.
Our culture is a grouping of relatively defined economic series of affiliation. The transfer of dollars is a basic indicator of human interaction.
Those portions of digital social networks that are incorporated into an economic ecosystem can be transferred into physical networks.
Those portions of digital social networks that are outside of economic ecosystems will have less likelihood of transferring into physical networks.
Political boundaries influence the creation of economic ecosystems.
Geographic boundaries influence the creation of economic ecosystems.
The probability of digital social networks transferring into physical social networks probably has some impact on how people behave within those networks, but I don’t know exactly what it is.
Digital social networks are both expanding and limiting. They expand our ability to connect and network with other people, but are limited by our inability to share the affective attributes of physical interaction. It is not precisely social; it’s more a fabrication of the intellect than the experience of the body.
The past few weeks, hidden beneath the clamor about healthcare reform (a word I use loosely), there’s been a lot of interesting data and commentary around gender, class, earnings and income.
The highlights: More women are better educated than men, higher earnings accrue to people with more education and less educated people have less [...]
To understand the future of mobile web usage, the best petrie dish is the Millenials. They’ve got a high level of tech comfort, have a new approach to privacy and transparency — more complex than you think — and are very invested in staying connected with highly fluid social circles.
MediaPost ran a short article [...]
The employment news on Friday was heartening and assorted media outlets are heralding the beginning of the end for the recession. The New York Times on its front cover this morning made the first stab at a hagiography of the Great Recession, lauding the Washington brains that have pulled our country back from the [...]
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