Henriette Weber

So I have been wanting to write this for about 2 weeks. Mostly because my email is flooded with questions about the “new” twitter thing. Yep twitter has gone mainstream in Denmark as well by now. So to all you wonderful people out there I have decided to explain a couple of things about twitter, how it differs from facebook, and how you can use it for marketing and branding.

If you look at facebook and the actions there (be it companies, profiles, groups or events) facebook is excellent at creating a social tail. A tail defined by your actions in facebook (and also a fragment of your online presence – supplied by RSS). This is what facebook does and is excelling in at this point. Interacting and exploring other people on behalf of data they themselves put out there.

Now Twitter is different – and it doesn’t have the same kind of social tail. Twitter is like small social raindrops of information more frequently and more impulsive than facebook is. Twitter seems agile, where facebook seems huge.

You can explore people on facebook. You can explore people on twitter. But where facebook is great to find out a lot of stuff about people based on a context, Twitter is great at exploring people based on conversation and interactions.

So you can actually follow people on twitter that doesn’t have to follow you back. You are being continously updated on people and brands you think are interesting – both on mobile but also on the web.

Furthermore you can actually import your twitterfeed to facebook and have twitter run as statusmessages on facebook – which also makes twitter a transitional community (the way to go in my Point of View),

Why should you be on both twitter and facebook ?

Because it’s two different kinds of interactions going on in facebook and on twitter. If you want to you could see twitter as “yet-another-social-media-distribution-channel”, otherwise you could see it as a valuable talk/feedback mechanism. Facebook is so social all the way, but I am afraid that its not where the cool kids hang for that much longer. Not when you have tools like twitter to supplement a part of it. from a marketing point of view you really need both these days.

oh and a couple of companies I think are doing one hell of a job on twitter.com

- http://twitter.com/zappos – Tony the CEO of Zappos.com has a great twitter voice

- the same does wired magazine http://twitter.com/wired

Basically if you want to toy around with twitter as a part of your marketing, remember no salespitches and don’t be rude or stupid. if you are posting stuff on twitter remember it has to be relevant information for the people following you. I suggest you head over there and try it out – Im here if you need me =)