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Twitter’s limitations shown by Harvard study

stewart@w00tonomy — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 11:08:02 +0000

Eager to cut through the hype engulfing Twittwe, some Tefal heads at Harvard Business School have done somerather clever research into how the microblogging tool is actually used.

First of all, despite what you may have heard, it turns out that Twitter is not the most important invention since fire and, surprisingly, will not bring about universal happiness and peace among all the peoples of the Earth.

The research found that most people using Twitter follow others. It also found that

The top 10% of users account for 90% of Tweets (as opposed to most social networks where the top 10% account for 30% of content)
50% of users update their feeds less than once every 74 days
Most users make one Tweet and then leave (mind you , on average 60-80% of blogs are abandoned after one month and blogging remains a powerful phenomenon

Sounds pretty damning, doesn’t it? But it depends what you are expecting from Twitter. As a two-way mass communication tool it fails but, in marketing and content-distribution terms, Twitter is incredibly valuable.

It’s huge: visitors to twitter.com grew 1,200% from Feb 2008 to Feb 2009 and Twitter has become the third largest social networking site in the US. Where Twitter excels is in narrowcasting relevant information to users who have expressed an interest in your content.

It’s not a mass communication tool but a way of connecting to specific interest groups. And targeted content is the Holy Grail of online communication.

Top tip on using Twitter for marketing

stewart@w00tonomy — Wed, 27 May 2009 11:16:51 +0000

We were tickled to come across the site How To Use Twitter For Marketing And PR. It’s entirely blank apart from one very large word:

DON’T

This plea for sanity is born out of the vast amount of Tweet spam that infects the microblogging tool. If you haven’t encountered this, create an account and wait for the flood of “followers” who offer you tips on alleged marketing or – on a less sophisticated level – links to NSFW images.

Adding to the background noise by setting up a corporate Twitter feed won’t help. The way to use Twitter – and any social media – to spread a message is to target your audience, identify exisitng networks of interest make sure that your message is relevant to them.

Why we and dancing Filipino prisoners like social media

admin — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 18:04:14 +0000

It useful to step-back sometimes and understand some of the psychology that underpins the social media channels we are using for our online marketing campaigns.

Here is very interesting seminar on Social Media by Mike Wesch of Kansas State University who produced the popular video ‘web 2.0 – what is and how to use it’ – you can watch this video in our favourites at w00tonomyTV.

Using YouTube as a case study it looks at why social media had become such a phenomenom in the world by appealing to humans need for individualism and community. Interestingly the audience demographics for YouTube for over 35 are 25%, the same as 12 -17 year olds; the largest group is 18 -24 year olds at 50%.

It is an academic video so you may not wish to watch it all the way through but the first 20 minutes is a very entertaining introduction to Social Media with examples of the viral effects of videos in Youtube – look out for the dance with the prisoners from the Phillippines.

Also for those of you who want to really understand ‘what social networks mean’ without the technical jargon he provides a very clear way to explain it all

YouTube is user generated content
Digg is user generated filtering
del.icio.us is user generated organisation
Technorati is user generated commentary

Hope you enjoy it!

[youtube TPAO-lZ4_hU]