My Top 5: Stop Saying Twitter is Dead or Get Out of the Way (Plus Some Facebook Stuff)

Stop Telling Me Twitter is Dead

Cruising social media posts by others in the industry, I sense a more frequent rash of “I don’t get value from Twitter” and “Twitter is dead” posts. Great! If you don’t get anything out of Twitter, then get out of the way. That doesn’t mean it is dead. I have seen Twitter thrive, even expand, in the case of municipalities finding it the easiest way to get out information, for local-level reporting to interact with the community (high school sports remains a very active hotspot for Twitter use), and other similar uses. Is Twitter not what we thought it would be, ideally, when it launched? Whatever that ideal was, probably not. I should add that my feelings have nothing to do with Twitter’s success as a businessseeking profits, but unless the service actually goes away, it doesn’t matter, at least not for now.

So let social media gurus declare Twitter is dead, and ignore it at their own peril as s0-called masters of media.

My New Favorite Twitter Feature

Back when Twitter launched “Moments,” I thought they had something that would keep me going back. They never got me to use it habitually, as compelling as the content is as a news skimmer, but oh well. Another new feature that has really got my attention, however, is threads. While the Social Media Cassandras are declaring Twitter “Dead,” I’m Reading Some of the Best Tweetstorms. A great example is University of New Hampshire (go Wildcats!) journalism professor Seth Abramson’s frequent rants about the legal stories surrounding our current, erm, unusual White House administration. An example (click through to read them all):

18/ It's at this point Davis—Patrick Davis, Deputy Chief Investigative Counsel for Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA)—engages in a sleazy sleight-of-hand. He tells Simpson his questions going forward on "Fusion GPS" *also* cover Orbis and other contractors.

— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) January 9, 2018

Granted, I don’t know if and how Twitter is monetizing this, but it glues me to Twitter more than anything else has in ten years.

The Watchers are Watching You Watch

As someone who as actively been a jobseeker at times over the last 20 years, I can appreciate the level of attention hiring managers pay to the people who apply. Any excuse to thin the field of applicants is valid. On that note, I caught this reminder recently from my friend Rachel Happe that employers can notice a lack of basic effort to do research for a potential job:

I guess it is too much to expect that people applying for @TheCR's research analyst position would actually download our research… https://t.co/j7gWpgdSe3

— Rachel Happe – post.news/@/rhappe (@rhappe) January 8, 2018

I would assume that a positive effort will be similarly noticed.

Evil Marketing Genius Hacks Dept:

A customer service request (with Google Store- I actually talked to a CSR rep from Google!) led me to check my email spam folder. I didn’t find what I was looking for (don’t worry Google Store soved my issue!), but I did find an email marketing guru’s email marketing newsletter there. As I had been on my New Year’s unsubscribe jag, that led me to think:

Email marketing genius tip: if you design your email to be automatically filtered into spam folder, it is far less likely that people will unsubscribe! #nocharge

— Doug Haslam (@DougH) January 10, 2018

Bold new strategy? I just found it amusing. And no, I’m not telling you who the marketing genius whose emails get spam-filtered is, as I stand by my passive-aggressive manifesto.

Image Credit: Johannes Ahlmann on Flickr

Questions for Facebook on the Newsfeed Changes

I may be burying the most important digital marketing story of the month, but that’s your reward for reading this far; Facebook has created an uproar with Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement of changes to the newsfeed that will further emphasize personal content over Pages (many of which are run by companies). Rather than trying to interpret what will happen and prescribe actions – aside from “don’t panic and keep putting out good content for now” – I have a few questions for facebook

• Is this part of the need to combat the spread of fake news? If so, this story in The New York Times is not encouraging: if the trials in other countries are part of this announced effort, then it’s possible the effect will be people seeing more “fake news,” not less. I would love to think that’s a priority, but I’m not convinced now. Are they fighting “fake news” on the share level or on the publish level? Hmmm.
• What will be the threshold for shared Page content making it into Newsfeeds? That seems to be unclear. That’s the main thing brands should be asking, rather than “how can I force my crap content down people’s throats?” We can hope Facebook can outline an agenda for brand best practices (and yes, it will include how paid content works, we’re used to that by now), but we may be forced, again, to rely on what we see actually working for us.
• What happens to stuff I want to share on my personal account? I don’t think that’s clear yet. I don’t even know how many people care. But if it changes, I look forward to the howls of protest from users.

Those are my barely-informed questions, which are far better than the barely-informed opinions we’re going to be enduring on other marketing blogs.