Oct

Pop Stars are Sucking the Blood out of Twitter

Ladies and gentlemen, er, I probably should say, “boys and girls,” I want to warn you that you won’t like this article if you’re a fan of Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, Selena Gomez, Rihanna or Taylor Swift.

I retract the statement. You can see their shows and buy their tunes. They know how to make music. What I really meant to say was if your number one reason for being a Tweetie bird is to follow these megastars via social media, you’re soon to hate the author of this piece.

Call me maybe. (Whatever that means.)

I took my daughter and her mostly non-Tweeting tweenage friends to the costume store a few days ago. While I was chuckling over the overpriced Axl Rose-in-a-bag costume, I discovered for $29.99 you can go trick or treating as almost any pop star (or Hunger Games character).

Then, when I went online, I found something even more disturbing. I found this article: Twitter’s 10 most retweeted tweets of all time. I guess since I created a link for you there, I’m suggesting you read the trashy piece about our trashy obsession with media trash, but if you’d rather not, let me save you the trouble.

Ugh. I want to be respectful of my fellow Social Media Today contributors, so I mean no harm when I point out this article about Twitter’s 10 Most Retweeted Tweets is dreadfully useless—except it points out how friggen’ useless Twitter can be.

I feel kinda’ bad. This is a site about social media. And the author of the article I cited wrote about what’s popular on social media. You probably want to know what these most popular RTs are. I did. So I clicked.

Now I can tell you what they are: they’re 60 percent pop music bullshit.

Is Twitter the new National Inquirer?

Maybe I’m the one full of it. I mean, if Twitter’s really meant to be a cheaper, faster, more accessible teen mag or tabloid, the birdbrain here is me. But if Twitter is supposed to be a real-time resource to connect consumers, companies, causes, and content creators, then I feel perfectly comfortable saying these pop stars are sucking the blood out of it.

Here’s your consolidated review of the top 10 most RT’d tweets:

• President Obama expressed his point of view on same-sex marriage. Whether or not you agree with the boss, I believe you should agree this is a viable use of Twitter.
• Some NFL player offended the league that pays him millions to play football.
• Some famous boxer challenged some other famous boxer to box.
• Calling on her fame, Kim Kardashian called attention to a cancer patient’s wish. Nice Kim.
• Six pop stars wrote about each other.
• Pop stars are confusing people about Twitter.

Justin and the singing sensations are making Twitter a bulletin board about bubble gum.

Vampires! I kind of hold Twitter sacred. If you’re still with me, maybe you do too.

As an online marketer and marketing copywriter, I see Twitter as a place where business people can do business. So, in an effort to answer the question “why,” which I hope you’re now asking, I did a little research to round-up a list of reasons.

Twitter tricks and treats.

This is not a Twittorial. This is a list of ten very good reasons to use Twitter for marketing and satisfying the important needs of your business.

• Research: Twitter is a fantastic listening tool. When you need to know what people are saying about your company and wanting to know about your area of expertise, you need to use Twitter.
• Sharing content: Consumers and business users are there to learn. Take advantage of this with hashtags and useful keywords.
• Delivering offers: Twitter’s apermission-based medium, so your audience there is likely to care about your offers. Use this, but be careful not to wear out your welcome.
• Collaborating: Twitter is a great collaboration tool, so you need to use it to communicate and collaborate with employees, partners, and customers.
• Serving customers: Customers will ask questions, make suggestions, and enter complaints where anyone can see them. Twitter must become a part of your customer service and support delivery.
• Recruiting and finding work: Recruiters are there. Job seekers are there. People are offering contracts and projects there. Be there.
• Personal Branding: Your blog and everything you create as part of your personal brand must be showcased on Twitter to expand your audience and establish your authority.
• Event communications: Twitter is a dynamo to promote your events before, during and after.
• Fund-raising: If you’re doing something philanthropic, Twitter must be in your media mix.
• Networking: My favorite reason to use Twitter… so many connections are made on Twitter. Go out of your way to make your pen pals real friends—outside of Twitter and even offline.

When I began using Twitter for business, I read “Twitter Marketing for Dummies,” by Kyle Lacy and learned a ton. You won’t find much in it about pop stars, but you will learn why Twitter should be taken seriously.

What can you add about Twitter? Add something share worthy and maybe it’ll be retweeted 100,000 times. Maybe it won’t.

Filed under: Social media/social media marketing by Barry Feldman
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