As if there weren’t enough blog posts out there about Twitter already…

Here’s another one.

To quote this book for the umpteenth time since I began my quest to gain knowledge about social media and its utilization in the world of public relations, “the majority of Twitter members are pure consumers of information, not participants. According to GigaOM, ’80 per cent of Twitter users have Tweeted fewer than 10 times and 40 per cent of users have never sent a single Tweet.'”

Phew!

I was starting to think that I was way under the average in terms of content creation and outward engagement on Twitter. Looks like I’m doing ok even though I’ve only sent 441 Tweets since I signed up for Twitter a few years back and sent this gem:

Joe’s famous first Tweet.

My Tweeting has up till now not focused that much on engagement seeing as I have basically used my Twitter as a sporadic information retrieval source. If I hear about something I may take to Twitter to learn more, or if I find something overly interesting I may share it on Twitter but for the most part my Twitter has been a series of in-the-moment statements, random attempts at communicating with celebrities, and the occasional sharing of what I feel to be useful and/or interesting information.

This all will be changing soon as I work on further developing my professional online presence. I do see Twitter being a very useful component of a good PR pro’s tool-belt, specifically the potential it shows for “listening” to the publics that you are attempting to communicate and develop relationships with.

I see a Twitter account (and the social media expert that runs it!) as the perfect tool to use as a kind of “global help and information desk” for whatever brand you represent. I suppose to be most effective you first have to do your research. Find out which hash tags the public uses when talking about your organization, or like many brands already do, create and promote your own hash tags to help direct people into channels you can easily follow and learn from. This offers those with questions and concerns an efficient and very direct line to the decision-makers who, by using the information provided by the public, can utilize Twitter to continually listen, learn, and revise in order to help their organization best serve it’s fans/public/consumers/what-have-you.

Lastly, as Keanu would do, engage, engage, engage! Once you know where your organization is being written about, become a useful part of the conversation. This is true not only on Twitter, but just about anywhere on social media. I don’t know about you but when I take to social media to talk about a product, company, celebrity, etc. and they actually respond to me it feels pretty good, and it’s something I don’t forget. It shows me that they care, that they are human, and they have my best interests at heart, which to a PR student seems like an absolute goldmine in terms of creating a brand reputation.

I’d keep writing, but I wouldn’t wanna wear out my sweet new keyboard. In case you haven’t noticed yet, I like to leave you all with a cool vid at the end of my posts, so on that note, watch this totally unrelated, yet undeniably awesome GoPro video:

Happy living y’all.