Completing a series of three articles re twitter – why, what how?
Part 3 – How does twitter fit in with web site, blogging, facebook, linkedin, other social networks?
I see my website as my anchor on the internet. My website says I am who I am, sets out my stall, explains how to contact me. I want my website to be found – by people looking for solutions which I can provide. Periodically I will update my website to describe additional solutions, new partnerships, new references/ endorsements.
My blog is where I provide my thoughts – hopefully my insights to emerging social, business, technical issues – as they occur to me and and I develop/ refine my thinking. I expect the blog to incorporate feedback from readers. Over a period of time my blog accumulates an amount of my thinking re the issues of the day.
So there does twitter fit in with all of this – and with the other networks in which I participate?
Twitter is the medium through which I develop interactive dialog with people of mutual interest (I am interested in their thoughts, they follow me – so presumably are interested in my thoughts). Through those contacts I am also looking to expand my network – attracting attention to my competencies and learning from other experts.
With this in mind I automatically notify twitter of any new blog postings. I post questions to twitter, I respond to queries from others on twitter. I use twitter to draw people’s attention to information which I think may be of interest to them.
Both linkedin and facebook are also important to my social and business networking. Initially I focused facebook on the social side and linkedin on the business side. Facebook now has a much broader role – and has an important business element to it. For now I have a range of contacts who may/may not use all of the solutions e.g. may be a member of facebook but not using twitter or linkedin, only use linkedin, etc.
All of these are being brought together. Many people are members of all of these (and many more) social networks. Initiatives such as SIOC are working to faciliate interoperability. Using tools such as Yoono with Firefox it has become very easy to update your presence/ status across mutiple environments. I cross post to facebook from twitter and using ‘company buzz’ on linkedin twitter references to me are published to linkedin.
So what’s twitter, at the end of the day? As one of my twitter friends (@rbconsulting) says, flippantly – ‘hard to belive it took them that long to get SMS working on the PC’. And that captures the essence of the microblogging limits. Twitter is that and more. Most importantly it’s a platform which makes it very easy to establish relationships with people all over the internet – for business, social, educational, recreational, whatever purpose. The value of the relationships flows from the level of interaction, quality of contributions, responsiveness.
It fits like a glove
Twitter should compliment your other social networking efforts but must be an extension of the target website or brand. What is your unique value proposition?
Barry, enjoyed the 3 part series on twitter – very informative on how twitter is currently integrating into business life and in some cases struggling to integrate.
I agree that the interaction between the various social media i.e. twittter, linkedin, facebook, blogs and the technology they use will be key to sucess of all of them. Novice social/business networkers, especially those on the wrong side of 30, will most likely use only one of the various media and are unlikely to venture away from that forum. Improvements in technological collaboration between the networking media would undoubtably see an expanded user base.
[...] my recent posts re twitter I referenced part of the value of twitter being the fact that you are looking at information [...]