There is More than One way to Tweet about things people Care About

Why there is not just one way to run social fan engagement 

I have been running lots of workshops of late for people running twitter accounts for brands of various kinds that people really care about.

Lets get one thing set out in black and white.

Tweeting about things people care about is different.

Many of the most engaged twitter followings are for betting brands, entertainers and retailers.

But it is different when people really care about what you are doing.

People engage in a very different way with causes, public bodies and organisations that they feel some ownership over.

Or at least if you are tweeting for that kind of brand, you want people to feel that way. That after all, is your great strength — and the reason social media should be a growing opportunity for you.

If you want to build that connection between you and the community around you think through what that user experience will really be.

Through the Fan Engagement Group I get to see how similar a lot of this user-behaviour is across tv and media, causes, music and sport.

I’m always wary of self-proclaimed social media experts. Especially those who write as if there were incontrovertible laws of what you should do — and what you should not. But my experience is lots of people read that kind of post (I’m trying to stop this post becoming a part of the genre).

There is more than one way to run a twitter campaign that mobilises fans around things they care about. Each with its own strengths and weaknesses.

Tweet to the fans — for most media organisations this is the default position. Take a look at the BBC, or the Wire magazine as examples. They use their account to publish content to fans.

The criticism often leveled at this is that it is ‘just broadcast messaging.’ On the flipside, accounts that default to this mode mostly achieve strong editorial consistency. The low risk approach also means we seldom see famous #tweetfails coming from them. You cannot argue with the following many of these accounts generate, capitalising on the reputation of the core brand.

The downside, however, is that this approach does little to build on a sense of connection to audiences. Social is just acting as the front page of the website — an effective one but this mostly under-utilises twitter as a platform.

Tweet with the fans — another approach is for the branded account to become a fan account itself. I’m sure Grant McCracken would understand the social science of this but there is huge value in sharing ‘in jokes’ on social media. Your core audience loves to feel like they have the inside track — take a look at Parks and Recreation, or this venerable sport account as diverse examples of giving audiences that sense.

The great thing with this approach is that fans are a hive brain of marketing ideas. HBO’s “Game of Thrones” had 82 community-generated videos uploaded to YouTube per every one uploaded by the network.

Those kind of stats have started the gold rush towards social media, but it takes work and a fair measure of skill to execute. The danger is that you lose all editorial direction — or still worse dip into takeover days that are almost always dull and confusing.

Tweet for the fans — another approach is to be the voice for the fans.

Sound and Music’s #wearenewmusic campaign, WeareNational, and MovemberUK regularly, in effect. use a branded twitter handle to curate user-generated content.

The old idea of User-Generated Content is increasingly outdated with these kinds of accounts — they are much more like community powered campaigns.

For each of these options there is a small library of blogs telling you they are the only justifiable path. That is bloggerati nonsense as each are working successfully around us today.

As twitter develops as a platform though it seems to also get more complex. With the upcoming introduction of closed group/ whisper messages a whole new area of engagement will open up.

At the same time, as users become more used to interacting with organisations they care about online, they also become more demanding.

As a result we all now need to develop accounts capable of switching between the three modes. Doing that means bringing alive a tone of voice capable of real storytelling — purely tweeting to fans will become harder and harder to sustain over time.

Most of all though, what shines through all the campaigns successfully mobilising online fans is one thing.

This one thing is sometimes a surprise to people when I mention it at workshops but I can guarantee they will find people have been trying to tell them this for ages — mostly it has been tweeted to them in slightly more exasperated terms.

The community need to know that you know they care.

They need to know that you you get it. Twitter can be a graveyard for well crafted, well meaning content, without a decent story around it. Just take a look at the accounts of most major charities to see the campaign ideas that never quite got moving.

As a practical task we all need to spend less time listening to the orthodoxies trotted out at conferences and blogging sites and more time listening to the people who care.

The best tweeters now spend more time listening than talking.