Twitter Echo Chamber in Full Gear

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Twitter Echo Chamber in Full Gear

Like many on the web, Twitter fascinates me. Most of my interest centers around leveraging Twitter for search and real-time trend appraisal.

But as Twitter’s rise become more and more regarded by the mainstream, there is an element of echo going on, where brands and companies are more and more using Twitter for no purpose really other than because they’ve heard Twitter is big.

There was a recent example of this done by Skittles. They turned over their homepage to Twitter Search results page. This did not go well.

First of all, the page was littered with obscenities and racial slurs. And most of the content that wasn’t out of line was simply about how Skittles was using Twitter on its homepage. Brands are finding that the most talk about thing when they utilize Twitter is that they are utilizing Twitter.

There are genuine ways in which brands can use Twitter. If they make it useful, customers will follow the brand. If coupon codes and sales are tweeted, then people will see some value in following a company’s account.

But if a company is simply telling people what they had for lunch and how nice the weather is, nobody is really going to care. There is not a lot of use for social media unless there is some kind of plan behind it that is actually going to bring in converting customers.

I think that Twitter is here to stay and it will grow and create a useful niche, but I also think there is likely to be a backlash after companies have been told for so long how great Twitter is, only to find it virtually useless in practice.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 17th, 2009 at 10:05 pmand is filed under Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.