Many companies would think it’s no big deal. In fact, if they
never used Twitter as a true information platform and dialogue tool, it probably won’t be. However, for any brand that embraced Twitter the right way and built, over time, a relevant community, it could be a bigger deal than expected.
For example, a few days days ago, singer John Mayer decided to quit his Twitter account, leaving more than 3.7 million followers behind. Why? Apparently, the PR folks decided to use this platform to promote the latest tour only.
So, was this a wrong move? Sure was.
John Mayer carries a brand, like any other company. It doesn’t matter if you have a thousand, 100 thousand or a million followers. These are real people that took the time to connect with your brand, many of them in a deeper way that you could probably know or measure. So, if your boss or the PR team decide to pull the plug on a relevant platform that connects with your audience, you might want to think it again.
We decided to follow the progress of all the comments worldwide with our brand monitoring software. We were very curious to know if people would take it easy or would get very emotional about Mr. Mayer quitting Twitter.
Check out first where the conversations took place:
The other exciting graph to explore was “Sentiment“. Naturally, the majority of mentions have neutral sentiment since it’s just people spreading the word without making comments, necessarily about how they feel. However, when we drilled down to the negative Vs positive comments, we found that most of them were negative:
What kind of negative comments? Here are some.
Conclusion
When using platforms to communicate / engage with your audience, you’ll discover pretty soon that it’s not about the tool any more but about the people that communicate with you. If you treat any of these social networks as “disposable marketing / PR initiatives” to satisfy metrics, you’ll be incredibly missing the point.
Think it this way: If you have a direct phone line that your audience uses every day to talk to you, share their thoughts, feedback, give you business, etc… Why would you get rid of it?
A few years ago, Coca Cola received a call from Facebook saying that a page with the name of their brand had over 1 million fans. Many PR departments would have said: “It’s not official, we didn’t authorise it, shut it down”. What did they do? They took over the page and immediately joined all those folks that chose that specific platform to communicate with them.
Would you ever think about quitting Twitter or any other social network? Any exceptions? Share your comments below!
Best
Fred
