As a content marketing strategist, a type of conversation that I regularly have with clients is one that pertains to social media strategy, how a brand should best go about leveraging its platforms, as well as what platforms can serve a brand’s marketing strategy the best. Over the years, the combination of both my raw experience, along with practical and technical knowledge of these platforms, has allowed me to be very skilled at what I do. Though I can say with certainty that each brand has its own unique promotional mix, at the same time, each brand has its own networks of priority: some companies prefer Facebook, while others are better suited to Instagram. Hell, just as much as newer networks such as TikTok are beginning to capture the fold, old networks such as LinkedIn have grown to have their own body of influencers.
For as much as the core functions of many of these earlier systems have stayed the same, however, social media is nonetheless a platform that evolves not only in its sophistication, scope, and its unique culture—but also in its application. While my abilities, knowledge, and general repertoire as a professional have evolved alongside these platforms, one dirty, stinky, lingering question would always hang around in the back of my head: What the fuck should these companies do with Twitter?
The funny thing is, for as much as I used to feel like an imposter for having this thought, over the course of years of speaking to other marketers—be they advertisers, social media marketers, or strategists—everybody has the same general consensus: Twitter is useless, and don’t waste your time with it. Now, fundamentally, as a platform, is it useless? No. But the credence to these marketers’ claims can be found on most business Twitter pages online: generally, they are nothing but a boring list of links to company blog posts that don’t generate value, are rife with irrelevant shit such as Friday memes, or simply start and stop once people get around to realizing that “Twitter is hard.”
People have actually said this to me, and as someone who has been a very active user of Twitter in the past, I used to look at these people as if I couldn’t hear more preposterous shit from a media professional in my life. What I did not understand, was that Twitter is easy as an individual. As a business, it is a whole other sport: There are brand guidelines to follow, company voice styling that has to be consistent, topical matter that has to be relevant, and a whole other smorgasbord of line items that have to stack up correctly in order to create a professional exterior for the general public. Compare that to running a personal account where you have the free reign to tweet a scattershot of cat videos, common shit talk, and outraged reactions to current events, and it becomes clear that Twitter actually is hard for business.
Or at least, that is how I used to think. But upon coming to terms with where value is generated on Twitter, who the average user is, how they interact, and what the role of business is in this mix, I’ve started to arrive at another conclusion: It’s not that Twitter is hard for business, it’s that most marketers are overthinking Twitter’s value proposition—as well as what its role is in a company’s promotional vertical. Let’s talk about that.
The Role of Authenticity
Something that makes Twitter unique, and arguably as unique of a network as TikTok, is that it relies on authenticity for most of its user interactions. Though there are many successful media accounts on Twitter, the overwhelming majority of users on Twitter are average people—and these people engage in what I will refer to as “authentic, human tweeting”. Just as much as Twitter can be used as, say, an RSS feed, it is also a place where community can be built. Company pages, effectively, function as RSS feeds—and this should hopefully explain why the average user doesn’t give a fuck about them. Inversely, it is in authentic, human tweeting where Twitter is most analogous to a message board—and it is also where all of that sweet, juicy, user engagement resides…well, there, and trending news.
In an ideal world, marketers could make the jump from being, effectively, a corporate news aggregator, to being something more human that people have an active desire to engage with. But here’s the problem: to become that thing, marketers would have to break almost every established norm of branding and communication that anchors their business to a consistent presence. In the end, all you are doing is running a human account.
Where Value Is Generated
So what is a brand to do? Authentic, human, tweeting is completely out of the question for most marketers, and just as many are not content with having a channel that is, in effect, completely running in the background. The thing is, while users have the power of authentic, human, tweeting on their side, brands have the ability to generate value on theirs.
The truth of the matter is that from a birds-eye view, value flows in the direction of links. But how are links created? By pointing tweets to a website. Therefore, how does one obtain the ability to consistently post links to their website? They start a blog, so as to be able to always provide new links.
When marketers take the time to think about it, they will realize that the most powerful brands on Twitter are news agencies—as they tend to have the most followers, as well as the most consistent scope of user interactions per tweet. Most crucially, however, the power of news agencies tends to skew with the number of links they produce per day.
This position only begins to make further sense when one takes into consideration the general extinction of RSS as a blog subscription protocol. Ultimately, Twitter advances the question of how do people follow web updates from news sources they want to hear from? The answer is that they have to follow the source itself—and that is all the corporate account is there for. While I have historically not been one to care for content syndication, Twitter is a platform that invites content syndication for businesses—and when you think about it, Twitter does this by design. They want your business to syndicate content. It increases the service’s overall utility to their average everyday user.
The point of confusion for business is this: that like other social media networks, Twitter presence is something that has to be grown on the Twitter network. In reality, all businesses need is for their content subscribers to have Twitter accounts. This is all said to suggest that usually, the best way to grow a Twitter subscription for a business is not by attempting to generate on-network interest via daily interaction. It is by generating direct brand interest outside of Twitter to such a degree, that people are effectively using your Twitter account as the channel for keeping up with updates from your website. Not only does this cultivate new Twitter follows, but it also provides a destination for conversations related to your brand whenever you tweet something you know your base will already be interested in.
A Method For Incorporating Authentic Human Tweeting
If reaching the epiphany that Twitter feeds are just glorified, corporatized, RSS readers doesn’t change anything for you, that’s fine. It is a remarkably un-sexy realization to come to—especially this late in my career. But what if I told you that there was one way for brands to “hack themselves” into authentic, human, tweeting so as to cultivate residual brand interest? Well, there is, but not without its own risks.
The loophole for brands into authentic, human, tweeting is by incorporating a two-layered approach to Twitter accounts that are associated with the company. Keep in mind, that a good number of companies already do this—but not always as an explicit component of a marketing operation. Effectively, the two-layered approach is when you have a corporate account that serves as the conduit for official information on your first promotional layer, supported by a series of high-level employees accounting for your second layer. Just as much as these employees follow company Twitter accounts, they also retweet, like, comment, and share company tweets right alongside their own normalized updates. By infiltrating company promotions into a series of authentic, human, tweets, brand content can be seen by more eyeballs—and has a higher propensity of being clicked on depending on that person’s individual social authority.
The problem with this approach is that it requires an investment in the idea that employees can have a personal brand that operates independently but in support of the brand that centrally employs them. Naturally, the liabilities associated with this come down to “well, what if the employee’s brand sucks?” but something many tend to forget is that the business still has a choice in what personal entities it wishes to associate with. Furthermore, companies also tend to forget that employees having a strong personal brand is only something that enhances their company’s perceived ability to hire and nourish top-tier talent.
Conclusion
In conclusion, this article may have reaffirmed a bunch of things that you have already thought about Twitter. But I think that the point of it is this: while Twitter’s role in a content strategy is one that is fairly unexciting for most businesses, that is okay. While the desire to just plug in an RSS feed and let it rip may smack of lazy content marketing, it is, in many respects, precisely what you are supposed to do with Twitter. The reasoning is clear: Twitter’s primary role and value proposition for all users is to serve as a content syndication engine. Nothing is effectively made on the platform or is even fundamentally unique to it. Hell, the most popular things on Twitter exist entirely outside of Twitter itself—and that should tell you everything you need to know about how to best use the platform.
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