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Finally, Twitter CAN make a cup of tea…!

21st February 2012 | Please add your comment

Julie gets a cup of tea thanks to TwitterTwitter can do a lot of things – but now it can even make tea…! Poorly Coronation Street actress Julie Hesmondhalgh, who plays Hayley Cropper, who managed to haul herself from her sick-bed yesterday afternoon to walk the dog and pick up the kids obviously had to return to bed later in the day to recover. Meanwhile, her other-half Ian Kershaw was busy downstairs being a good Dad. So just how could Julie get a cup of tea when her poorly voice couldn’t shout downstairs? Twitter..!

Julie sent a Tweet to Ian and then asked her Twitter followers to do the same. Before long a cup of tea made its way upstairs with Ian then writing: “Thanks everyone – Ju’s got her brew now (no biscuits though, she’s ill, I’m not *folds jammy dodger in gob*)”. Well done Twitter…! You managed to bring a poorly woman a much-needed cuppa.

When you can’t use your voice you need another communications vehicle. Writing a note and throwing it down the stairs may have worked, of course, but that would have taken longer for the happy family in the kitchen to have noticed it. Julie could have got up and walked downstairs, but obviously wasn’t up to that. She could have phoned – but then how do you make yourself clear if your voice isn’t working well? Texting an SMS message is another possibility – but that can cost money…! Twitter is the obvious choice…! And it has another benefit – people power. Not only could Julie ask for her tea, but Ian felt the social pressure of all those adoring fans demanding he put the kettle on.

It is an interesting example of an unusual use of Twitter. It was never invented for getting cups of tea…! But that’s the fascinating thing about Twitter – every day people invent new uses for it. Twitter is a status updater, a conversation tool, a search engine, a quiz machine, an information distribution engine, an emergency tool and a host of other things all done within 140 characters.

So it begs the question – if Julie can get Twitter to make a cup of tea, what are you going to use it for in your business today?

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Twitter users prefer information to being social

3rd February 2012 |

Twitter of FacebookTwitter is a great social network – after all, you can have quick conversations with people, sharing your thoughts about a TV programme “live”, or commenting on a soccer player’s mishaps on the field with other Tweeters in the stadium. You can even tell people you are eating a cheese sandwich, if you wish. However, when you look at a stream of Tweets you will notice it is full of links – these take you to blog posts, to pictures, to videos, essentially to other sources of information.

Over at Facebook, the density of links is lower. People hold conversations and share pictures, or their play games with groups of like-minded friends. But the sharing of information and leading people towards other sites appears to be lower.

Could it be that Facebook is “more social” than Twitter? Do we use these different social networks for alternative purposes?

These are the kind of questions which are partially answered by a new research study from the University of Manchester. The research looked at 300 social networking users and was trying to find out if there was any connection between personality type and which social network people used. The study did not really find any strong connection between measures of personality and either Twitter or Facebook. There were some minor variations, but nothing significant.

However, the study revealed a difference in the way people tended to use these social networks. It transpires that Twitter users seek more fulfilment of the “need for cognition” – the psychological term for the desire to be mentally stimulated. This suggests that what we want when using Twitter are those links to more useful information, whereas we don’t look for this when we are on Facebook.

It means that if you wish to make the most of Twitter you need to be sure you add links to useful information – not just fun stuff, but material which people will find interesting and valuable. But if you do this on Facebook, the research implies that you will get lower engagement because that’s not the kind of thing we want to find on that social network.

The research is not really conclusive, but it does demonstrate that we do appear to use different social networks for alternative purposes. That means if you are using social media as a means of promoting your business or connecting with your customers, you should provide slightly different kinds of content on each network you engage with. On Twitter, provide links to thought-provoking material – on Facebook, just chat about that material.

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Twitter can manipulate your behaviour

25th January 2012 |

Twitter can make you feel wantedTwitter is not necessarily doing what you think it does. Rather than being the place where you send out short messages to your friends and colleagues it may be the place where your behaviour is manipulated by software. Researchers in Boston, USA, have discovered that “Twitter bots” can change our behaviour. The “bots” are automated pieces of software that trawl through the Twittersphere, find some target Tweets and then automatically Retweet them. To the original Tweeter it looks like a human being has found what they said interesting. Far from it; the Tweet may never have been actually read by a real person.

The Twitter bots also sometimes include a “mention” in the Retweet. That means, for instance, if I were to Retweet something you said on Twitter, but also included my son’s Twitter name in the Retweet I would have given him a “Twitter mention”; inserting anyone’s Twitter name or handle into a Tweet is a “mention”. The automated bots will do this at random, adding people who have used similar words to your original Tweet. The implication is that one of your “followers” knows that someone else would also be interested in what you have to say and so is effecting an introduction. Indeed, this is what happens all the time with real people but automated software can do it too.

The problem for Twitter users is this. Unless you know the person who is Re-Tweeting you, the Retweet could come from automated software – not a real individual. But the inclusion of “mentions” merely adds to the illusion that someone else thinks your content is worth spreading and sharing to other like minded people.

The result is that these automated Twitter bots can fool us. They can make us think people value our material, when in actual fact no-one has engaged with our Tweets at all. However, what the researchers found next is fascinating. It seems that the automated bots are so good at giving an impression of human behaviour we behave as we would do in the real world. The bots appear to be helping create new followers and connections between the various people mentioned in the automated Retweets. In essence, the bots are creating introductions, helping us network.

But the problem is – in the real world we only introduce people to each other who we think will get on, who will share common interests or who we think can help each other. Twitter bots cannot make such value judgements and are therefore inferior to natural human behaviour. Even so, we appear to be take in by them. Perhaps it is time to review your Twitter Followers and to make sure you are only being followed by real people. That way you will minimise your chances of being manipulated by software into following other people who you have little real connection with.

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How to get millions of visitors to your website without paying a dime

28th October 2011 |

Simon Cowell shows how to get trafficX-Factor supremo Simon Cowell is fuming. Viewing figures for the prime-time show are down significantly compared with last year. But I suspect after making his views known via the front page of The Sun, the number of people watching will be back up this weekend. Millions of people who previously couldn’t care less will tune-in tomorrow night to see what drama has been added to boost things.

But just how did the enterprising Mr Cowell achieve that likelihood? Did he spend some of  his millions advertising the show? Did he take out an endless array of pay per click adverts? Did he have to improve the “search engine optimisation” of the show website? No. All he did was make a phone call to the TV Editor of The Sun. OK, I admit, it did cost Simon Cowell an international phone call as he is based in the USA at the moment, starring on the American X-Factor, but in terms of costs a phone call is effectively free compared with the price of advertising.

It is an example of the power of public relations – PR. And Mr Cowell is not the only one to understand this. Take young Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, for instance. Just how did he get students at Harvard to become interested in his fledgling social network? He did an interview with the campus newspaper. It worked and when the network was added to Stanford one of his first tasks was to ensure he was interviewed by the student newspaper there. When Facebook was launched at Stanford it was swamped as a result. Nowadays, you can’t find a popular magazine or newspaper in the world that hasn’t included Mark Zuckerberg somehow. Very little cost and hundreds of millions of visitors.

Meanwhile, over at Twitter headquarters, the executives there have a problem; they don’t have much money. True they have investment from venture capital firms and a small amount of advertising income, but compared with Facebook they are poor. And Facebook is a pauper compared with Google. Yet, up against these traffic titans, Twitter has to do something to get visitors – yet it cannot really afford the level of advertising it might need to generate that interest. But it doesn’t need to bother. Free of charge, Twitter has become the most talked about Internet brand name on TV. Every show, it seems, has Twitter on it.

Thirteen years ago, it was Google in the same position. The two students who invented it couldn’t afford any real marketing, so all they could do to let people know about their new-fangled search engine was to get interviewed by journalists. Google, like Twitter is now “everywhere” – mostly via free publicity.

Yet, businesses struggling to get visitors to their websites are spending their hard earned cash on pay per click or search engine optimization only to find that the effect is largely minimal. They focus on the data. The numbers of visitors achieved by pay per click or by SEO are easy to see. Get yourself on the news and discovering who visited you for what reason is more complex. Hence people avoid it. Plus businesses have little experience with journalists and tend to be scared of the media – another reason for keeping away from it. But if you look at Google Trends you’ll discover that there is a relationship between media coverage and visitors to your website.

Consider the recently launched crime map in the UK. Look at the Google Trends results for the search “crime map”:

UK Crime Map Trends

You will notice several peaks in traffic. They are related to major stories in the newspapers:

Crime Map News

Every time the words “crime map” were in the news, up shot the search volume for that phrase. In other words it is OFFLINE activity which tends to drive online search. That means you need to generate lots of offline interest and mentions of your website if you want to gain more online traffic.

Take a tip from Simon Cowel – get yourself in the news, perhaps even on the front page of The Sun….!

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Target the truly social people and you will make more money on the internet

26th October 2011 |

Shopping is socialHere’s a simple psychology project you can do yourself this weekend in your local High Street. Sit yourself down in the café or restaurant of your nearest department store and do a bit of “people watching“. All you have to do is count the number of shopping bags each person is carrying and the number of people they share a table with. My prediction? When people are alone, they will have fewer shopping bags than when they are in a group. The reason is that shopping is a social experience. Your local British Home Stores, for instance, doesn’t just have a restaurant because they can make some extra cash selling pie and chips and a latte. They also have a café because shopping is a social experience. When shops make shopping social, they do better.

So it is not much of a surprise that when people are really social online, they tend to be more interested in buying things. That’s because their increased level of social activity on the web allows more chatting about purchases, wish lists and so on. Truly sociable people chat happily about their buying behaviours. When we are less social, we chat less about what we buy and more about what we do.

This is borne out to some extent by new research on the impact of adverts on Twitter. The study has found that when people use Twitter more, they also proportionally engage more with advertising on Twitter. Of the people who logged into Twitter up to 10 times a month less than 2% of them actually engaged with an advert. But over 20% of the people who used Twitter more than 100 times a month engaged with an advert. The study shows that the more social people are, the more they are likely to engage with commercial messages.

Twitter adverts attract social people

This suggests that if you target your commercial messages at social people, you will make more money. It is yet another reason why your business needs to focus on social media in preference to every other kind of online marketing.

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