{"id":1348,"date":"2013-02-10T23:26:52","date_gmt":"2013-02-10T23:26:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jonhartley.com\/blog\/?p=1348"},"modified":"2013-08-30T00:11:33","modified_gmt":"2013-08-29T23:11:33","slug":"silly-conversations-twitter-versus-linkedin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/jonhartley.com\/index.php\/silly-conversations-twitter-versus-linkedin\/","title":{"rendered":"Silly conversations : Twitter versus LinkedIn"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"apples-and-oranges\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Sugar or salt? Which is better?<\/p>\n

Well of course neither sugar or salt is essentially better than the other but they both have their place. I’d never have salt in my tea. Sugar on my chips would be awful. I like a bit of both in my porridge.<\/p>\n

A similarly daft question is \u2018Twitter or LinkedIn?\u2019 Like sugar and salt they both have their place, but you might not think so reading the headline of the following widely syndicated report, ‘Small Firms Say LinkedIn Works, Twitter Doesn’t’<\/a><\/p>\n

The punch of the headline is mitigated somewhat by the report\u2019s second paragraph where it reads,\u00a0\u2018Just 3% of 835 business owners surveyed…said Twitter had the most potential to help their companies.\u2019\u00a0This suggests a more nuanced response to different social media platforms which might properly read \u2018Small firms say LinkedIn works better than Twitter.\u201d Even then I would be reluctant to let the argument rest.<\/p>\n

Sugar does what sugar does best. Salt does what salt does best. LinkedIn does what LinkedIn does best, Facebook does what Facebook does best and Twitter does what Twitter does best. The fact is that Twitter is not actually in direct competition with LinkedIn or Facebook.<\/p>\n

One businessman quoted in the article, Todd DeMann, reports that \u2018Facebook was the sixth-largest driver of online traffic to his website. Twitter ranked 117th.\u2019 (No question that Demann takes social media seriously. He has over 117 drivers of online traffic!) and on this basis he condemns Twitter as a place where\u00a0“You can’t engage in a meaningful way.”<\/p>\n

I\u2019d disagree. You can provoke meaningful engagement on Twitter despite the 140 character limit in the same way I\u2019ve provoked some very meaningful engagements with a few words in a party kitchen, or Coca Cola aims to in a hideously expensive Superbowl ad.<\/p>\n

Twitter is the modern equivalent of that elevator ride for which all serious business people have been practicing their pitch these last hundred years. In fact these days we should be asking ‘What’s your Twitter profile message?’ instead of ‘elevator pitch.’<\/p>\n

I\u2019d also question DeMann\u2019s dismissal of Twitter and that of Ken Lopez later in the same article as a poor driver of traffic to the website by asking just how provenance of website visits are determined. Is it not possible that a significant part of LinkedIn and Facebook generated visits owe some debt to Twitter and the real life, analogue chatter it can provoke among its millions of users?<\/p>\n

If Twitter is responsible directly for even 1% of visits to DeMann\u2019s site http:\/\/www.freshology.com<\/a> and indirectly for a further 1% then it would be providing a useful function.<\/p>\n

The fact is that even if it isn\u2019t yet a significant driver of direct visits to your company website Twitter is a service to which over a half a billion people subscribe<\/a>. Not all will be regular active users but nevertheless there is a massive potential audience there full of humans as susceptible to seductive messages, questions, puzzles and come-ons as any other and given the low cost of tweeting why would any businessperson choose to ignore it? (Interestingly neither DeMann or Lopez ignore it)<\/p>\n

I hear the answer \u2018time!\u2019 Business people have limited time and very little to waste. That\u2019s why they might choose to concentrate on LinkedIn and Facebook and not Tweet. \u00a0The solution to time constraints of course is a social media dashboard like Hootsuite where messages, invitations to engage, can be posted to all three platforms simultaneously.<\/p>\n

As a final note we should remember that social media platforms are not simply about generating website traffic and shouldn\u2019t be judged solely on their ability to do so. Social media like Twitter are very useful places to research markets and to monitor a company\u2019s performance. In the article \u2018Small Firms Say LinkedIn Works, Twitter Doesn’t\u2019 one interviewee, Josh Weiss, points out that while Twitter is not a place where he sells, \u2018he now uses Twitter as a surveillance tool, to keep tabs on fashion trends and competitors. He says he noticed complaints from rivals’ customers about shipping charges, so he began advertising free shipping on his site to give his firm an edge.\u2019<\/p>\n

All said and done I think the headline \u2018Small Firms Say LinkedIn Works, Twitter Doesn’t\u2019 speaks more to the imperatives of journalism and selling a story than the reality of Twitter\u2019s importance and relevance to the world of business social media.<\/p>\n

If you have any comments I would be glad to hear them. You might also like to take a look at my article on Twitter success stories in the UK.<\/a><\/p>\n

Remember! you can subscribe to our blog, choosing alerts on updates to only those categories that interest you.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Sugar or salt? Which is better? Well of course neither sugar or salt is essentially better than the other but they both have their place. I’d never have salt in my tea. Sugar on my chips would be awful. I like a bit of both in my porridge. A similarly\u2026<\/p>\n

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