Читать книгу The Social Media Advantage - Holly Berkley - Страница 12

By 2013, nearly 28 million Americans will be tweeting. (emarketer.com, February 2011). Many business professionals say Twitter is a great way to monitor what competitors and thought leaders are doing, stay informed of recent articles and blog posts relating to a subject of interest and get the inside scoop on what stories the media is researching.

Twitter users follow* people, organizations and companies of interest to receive real-time communications from these companies. Another way of using Twitter is to search for a keyword or phrase to sort all the tweets that mention the topic. Spend a little time reading the results and you can pick up on the topic-specific lingo and common hashtags. A hashtag is the # symbol followed by a key term, like #obama. Hashtags are used for more than just listening in on streams to identify influencers in a particular field. They allow conversations among fellow attendees at offline events and conferences to post messages. You may also see more TV News and radio programs mention a specific hash tag related to a topic of discussion. This provides an easy way for those interested in a specific topic to contribute, ask question or follow a conversation stream in real time.

Balmori Associates, the N.Y.-based landscape architecture and urban design firm hosted an in-person discussion of public space in its New York office with 40 Dutch landscape architecture students and their professors. In an effort to open the conversation to participants worldwide, Balmori Associates combined streaming video and Twitter, using the hashtag #mpplaces. The discussion used a Balmori project, the redesign of the public spaces in Balmori’s own neighborhood (the Meatpacking District of New York’s Greenwich Village) as the focus. The Twitter forum, with internal and external participants, narrowed in on the topics of shared space, urban decorum, context and public spaces’ relationship between past and present.

“What I found of greatest value in Twitter was that it allows non-hierarchical comments; it did not become a debate of stars,” wrote the firm’s Principal Diana Balmori. The confines of 140 characters limits intellectual intimidation and as a result generates more input, because everyone relies on simple language to drive home their point. Participants were able to react instantly to the speaker’s comments. Balmori continued, “Twitter diminishes the gulf between speaker and audience.” Because participants are able to react instantly to shifts in conversation, “it increases participation by making everyone a speaker.”

“Originally, I used Twitter to research information on various topics using hashtags,” explained Kristin Worley, marketing facilitator of Woolpert, Inc. (http://www.woolpert.com/), a national design firm from Charlotte, N.C. “From that point on however, I realized how much value Twitter actually provided. I have used the articles and networking I gained through Twitter to guide internal corporate staff in their decision-making processes. Twitter also provides the opportunity for knowledge sharing among individuals, organizations and companies in the industry. Our marketing group has also used it to communicate with others regarding conference events, which is a great way to open more doors to conferences and tradeshows and further extend value to the attendees.”

To help you get the most out of Twitter, try using TweetDeck, HootSuite or Sprout Social to organize those you follow into streaming lists. You can also use these sites to set up ongoing keyword and hashtag searches in an easy-to-see-it-all interface. The Twitter programs mentioned above can also help schedule future tweets, post updates to your other social platforms and monitor your influence and who your top influencers are.

We’ll talk more about how you can increase Twitter followers and amplify your efforts in Chapter 3.