It’s time to embrace conversations on Twitter

In recent weeks, we have been hearing a lot about the “inevitable” demise of Twitter.

Our clients are explaining to us about how they do not want to invest in Twitter anymore for their operations. Enterprises publicly discussing how they are taking their online marketing dollars off of Twitter and onto other platforms. Startups claiming that Twitter is just not worth their precious time or limited resources.

Here is the thing, Twitter isn’t dying.

Is it struggling? Certainly.

Does it need to update itself to stay relevant and rebuild momentum? Absolutely.

But it isn’t dying yet.

Perhaps in the future, it can be… but today, Twitter is simply evolving into its next stage of a product cycle and something that we, as brands, companies, enterprises and yes, even startups, need to jump on now while the market isn’t saturated.

So… if that is the case, what do we need to jump into? What does Twitter give us that we should be leveraging in our operations? The answer is pretty clear.

Conversations.

Facebook has been aggressively pushing its Messenger app for all things communication. One-on-one conversations to be precise. Same with Snapchat’s heavy investment into building it’s Snapchat functionality in recent months. Great tools, great business applications for companies to leverage, but it leaves open an entire realm of possibility when it comes to the public forum format that consumers, businesses, and decision makers still need in today’s marketplace.

This is where Twitter is still the best. It’s time to take it a step further and not only give our companies a narrative on Twitter but to be frank, an actual voice. We need to begin sharing content on Twitter without forcing the conversation back to our blogs, but staying on Twitter itself. Start involving your audience, everyone that you can, and even encourage your own following to join in on the conversations they’re witnessing at a distance.

For context, we have been experimenting with this ourselves. You may have noticed in recent weeks on our Twitter account about how we don’t just respond to every single tweet coming at us… we are responding through the retweeting functionality that Twitter gives us in their native apps, copying the original conversation on the bottom of our responses. This is by design. It both gives our readers the context of the conversation and its origins. More importantly, it gets rid of the @username to start a conversation, limiting who sees our responses. It instead allows our discussions to be publicly visible and therefore; accessible to any of our followers to join.

Why is this huge?

Well, for starters, open communication is the easiest way to build trust and credibility. We have never beaten around the bush at Chop Dawg that this has been our biggest strength in obtaining new work and new clients. We take the time to learn about our audience, take the time to listen to their very own needs, and slowly build valuable relationships that either return to us as a client or knows an individual who will be a great client for us. It is because we care.

Twitter gives us another outlet to exploit and leverage the genuine empathy we have for our clients and potential clients. An opportunity to make an even larger impact, and perhaps most exciting for us, keeping the conversations intimate while allowing any and all to join in. How cool is that?

Filtering Signal from the Noise

Second and perhaps most crucial to understand, Twitter’s “demise” is really just a noise problem. Twitter doesn’t have an algorithm like Facebook (and now Instagram) to sort content by your interests or popularity. It is showing you everyone you follow, all of their retweets, conversations, and more.

The only way to compete with noise is to create stand-out content and second, have content visible when your targeted audience is browsing. Conversations give us the opportunity to do that. The more content and in this circumstance, conversations we create, the more visibility we establish for our target audience and we can translate that into trusted fans, potential clients, possible relationships.

Don’t try to wait until Twitter is fully relevant again to take advantage of this. It is our responsibility as the decision makers of our companies to be ahead of the curve, leveraging opportunities with the least amount of risk and investment, to build new relationships every single day.

If you start creating more conversations, more dialogues, more discussions on Twitter in a meaningful, valuable way to your target audience, you can bet that your ROI, in the long run, will be substantial. In the meantime, you’ll find us on Twitter responding to everyone’s thoughts on this article.

About me: I build apps and help grow companies as CEO of ChopDawg.com & co-host of #thePawdcast. Email me for a free consultation.