Twitter is hugely successful — but that phenomenal growth may be hurting its potential as a marketing platform, argues Dan Schawbel in the lead item from today’s SmartBrief on Social Media.
Schawbel writes that the impact of each individual tweet diminishes as Twitter gets more users and each user follows more and more people. With everyone’s feeds becoming increasingly crowded, the odds that any given tweet will have an impact become smaller and smaller, he writes.
Of course, Schawbel writes that Twitter still has plenty of other business applications — he notes that it’s still great for research, recruitment and customer service, among other tasks. But the network’s days of being a easy way to generate buzz may be gone forever.
Are Twitter’s best days as a marketing platform behind it? Is there any way for the network to restore its effectiveness as a buzz engine?
Image credit, Dmitry Nikolaev, via Shutterstock (read more…)
For a second, it looked like adding location-based functions to Facebook would be a real you-got-chocolate-in-my-peanut-butter moment. But as we note in today’s SmartBrief on Social Media, early reports suggest some brands may be sticking with networks that specialize in location, such as Gowalla and Foursquare.
Kunur Patel argues that users on location-based networks may be more influential than the ones on Facebook. Other experts suggest that Facebook’s privacy woes may be making some users reluctant to embrace the network’s location-based features.
What do you think — are Foursquare and Gowalla better for location-based marketing than Foursquare? Why? Is Facebook at a temporary disadvantage, or is it in for long-term difficulties competing in the location-aware space?
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Facebook privacy drama continues to be the lead story in SmartBrief on Social Media — as more inflammatory Mark Zuckerberg comments surfaced and company called an emergency meeting to talk about users’ privacy concerns.
Some are arguing that Zuckerberg needs to “come clean” with users about his views on privacy. But I’m not so sure that’ll help. We already know plenty about Zuckerberg’s views on privacy. The real question is, what can the company do to make it up to its users? How can it begin to re-establish trust?
How can Facebook begin to restore its relationship with its users? Is the company better off reaching out or staying the course? Does Mark Zuckerberg need to be more candid about his views on privacy?
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In the lead story of today’s SmartBrief on Social Media, Craig Daitch makes the argument that Facebook alternatives have become necessary in light of changes to the way Facebook handles personal data.
Daitch is reacting to recent events, but many social experts would argue that diversification would be an important part of a social-media strategy even if Facebook were doing everything right.
Brian Solis’ famous Conversation Prism, for example, builds on the idea that a social strategy should be based on the kind of connections you’re trying to make, rather than tied to a specific technology. Regardless of how you feel about Facebook’s privacy policies, diversification can be a powerful way to increase the impact of your social efforts.
How many social networks does your social strategy involve? Are you looking at adding or removing social networks from your strategy? What criteria are you using to decide when your social strategy needs to adapt? (read more…)
Past studies have shown Twitter users are pretty good at predicting the performance of movies, but now a Carnegie Mellon University study suggests the network could someday be used to glean information about public opinion on all sorts of subjects.
As we note in the lead story of today’s SmartBrief on Social Media, Twitter isn’t without limitations as a polling mechanism, yet data based on tweets seem to track well with traditional polling over the long term. It will be interesting to see how these data are used as the methodology for surveying Twitter becomes more refined.
Would you trust public-opinion figures that were based on tweets? Do you see Twitter becoming a viable alternative to traditional opinion polling?
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