Who Is Your Website Talking To?
This post was made Jun 29, 2009 by Carlos del Rio
Recently the Internet has been all atwitter about social media and real-time search–especially in the wake of celebrity deaths. I want to highlight a very important issue of Twitter and its social media compatriots. Social media is very short lived. After about 30 days any event, and the knowledge surrounding it, are lost to the flood of information. The short time frame and cache value that come from introducing popular concepts or good deals to these communities make these communities best suited for Spontaneous and Competitive customer types. This fast pace and high turn over leave the more methodical customer types, Researchers and Humanistic, under served.
Because they act more slowly Researchers and Humanistic Buyers are more likely to leverage legacy information. Legacy information is best served through, blogs, forums and static content that the users can return to. However there are ways to introduce these users to content that engages them: one is to include action points for human interaction or research in your social media landing pages; the other is to monitor media streams to contact these searchers when they are trying to recreate the information that the Twitter stream has purged.
Consider leveraging URL shorteners and your analytics URL tags to separate out how your media stream engagement is different between active campaigns and one-off responses. Just because real-time media is ill suited for the more methodical types does not mean that there are no opportunities there.
I’m not sure if you’ve noticed already, but there is a misspelling in your title. Shouldn’t it be “your” ?
Personally, I don’t think that Social networking sites should be used in the way that many professionals are using it. Especially Twitter. I think that it should remain more for personal use, and that blogs or forums should be used for more professional dealings.
Thanks for the heads up.
Eventually, as the online environment changes, the way people use the popular sites will change.