Advocates of Twitter usage have long been pointing that it’s great for shorthand media pitches and a great alternative to SMS or texting. But what it lacks lies in the very thing that made it such a household name: 140 characters or less.Having specifics to communicate on Twitter is impossible—even in a DM, because that will only take you so far in characters. If your goal is to pitch an event or product, you have to be very general but still include a call to action. Chances are the recipient will either ignore your @reply, not see it, or DM you with their e-mail address to send more info their way. A person’s amount of followers depends of whether or not they’ll see the pitch, unless they’re hungry for searching out their Twitter ID, who’s used it and how.
The other side of the specifics argument is using Twitter as an alternative to e-mail, text or the telephone. You can’t have long-running conversations on microblogging platforms such as Twitter and I’m really not sure why social media consultants have Twitterviews (interviews via Twitter) because the back-and-forth seems to be tedious and long-winded at best. No one wants to see a blog post detailing an interview conducted on Twitter provided a twitter feed screen grab showing drivel in every tweet. As you move along reading the tweets, you’re thinking, “get to the point already!”
@Comcastcares is also a great example of the specifics problem. Here’s the tweet and response scenario on Twitter:
@person1 Comcast sucks. Charged me $200 for installation fee and still my Internet doesn’t work. Not happy.
@Comcastbob Hi, how can I help?
@person1 My internet is not working and I’ve had a service rep come out to my house 3 times and it still isn’t fixed.
@ComcastBob Please DM me your home phone number and I’ll take a look.
Even @ComcastBob (and other @Comcastcares staff) realizes that this problem is going to take a lot more than Twitter dialogue to document, so the DM with a phone number follows. This shows us that Twitter is simply a means to an end but cannot provide the nitty-gritty of ISP server trouble-shooting. After all, who would want to in 140 characters or less? Why not just handle it in a phone call.
Short-lived share of information. One of my biggest irks with Twitter is that the Axiom account has over 2,000 followers and every ‘refresh’ equals a new Twitter feed that replaces the 2-minute-ago tweets. I know I can hit the back button, but that’s somewhat irritating. Sometimes you just miss information altogether because Twitter is too fast. This is like someone talking excessively at you and you aren’t allowed the time to soak in the information. You then say, “I’m sorry. Can you repeat that?” To which they reply “Huh?” because they don’t understand that question in this new environment. Twitter understands a person’s desire to keep it relevant and offers services like ‘favorites’ or Tweetdeck, but still, I’d much prefer a feed that represents all of what I’m into, as opposed to having to seek it out. (If there are other services out there that completely do away with this argument, please let me know in comments. I’d love to check them out.)
Word-of-mouth (WOM) can reach a stand still. So you just figured out that Twitter is a great tool to communicate your contest or promotion. You think the WOM will spread like wildfire because Twitter is fast and offers residual networks that will just take off in promotion-push stride. Wrong. Pushing out a contest has its limits on Twitter and it’s primarily due to this: the more popular someone is, the more likely they will miss your general message. This tells us that, like mass e-mail distribution, general tweets are not good to push a contest or promotion. You need to personalize it if you want to garner longevity—the type of longevity that leads to a blog post or publicity for the promotion. True, you will see people RT your general announcement, BUT it has only grabbed them for 2 minutes and 20 seconds (140 characters) or less. And if you think 15,000 followers equates to 15,000 promotion/contest tweets you’ll monitor and bring back to the client-- wrong again. You will never know what the person is thinking, and furthermore, how the person will use the info. The more personal you make a push for a promotion or contest, the better.
While I’ve mentioned three problems with Twitter’s short-hand style, one thing always rings true and involves this great rule of thumb when working in any social network: focus on the relationships, not the quantity.