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BREAKING NEWS & VIEWS
Hendricks: How to Save Your Publication in 140 Characters or Less Including punctuation and spaces, that last sentence was exactly 140 characters, the maximum length of a post on Twitter, the popular micro-blogging service. As you’ve probably heard, Twitter is the newest bastion of self-promoters and publicity hounds on the Internet. In percentage terms, it is the fastest-growing service on the Web today, next to Facebook. So, why do we need another social media tool? Because services like Twitter are your best defense against irrelevance. It’s quite possible that you’re reading this because someone you’ve never met in person has tweeted about this article. When they tweeted about it, perhaps it ended up on their Facebook feed, as many social media users typically link their Facebook status to Twitter. Or perhaps you already use Twitter, and you found it right there on your home page. The post might have been something like this: “How to save your publication in 140 characters or less: http://tinyurl/w4756” You clicked on it and now you are here. That’s great news for you and for minonline. Thanks to a Web service that makes no money, and to its legions of early adopters and news mavens, you’re a reader. Extra! Extra! Everyone Can Read All About It Twitter is the best news distribution tool since the newsstand. I love email, but it’s not in the same league with Twitter when it comes to the ability to drive site traffic as fast as the news is posted. The Drudge Report, HuffPost and even Tina Brown’s the Beast. All great, but their content is still managed and moderated by editors, whose biases dictate what links you see, with the exception of user comments. They are all blogs, like Twitter. And Twitter’s “push” model and audience are bigger than anyone’s email address book. And much faster than a carrier pigeon. Twitter is deceptively simple. It allows its users to post pithy 140 character summaries of what they are doing, including links and pictures, from their computer, cell phone or similar device—all in one little box on screen. You can also automatically post links or updates by RSS from blogs. It’s about the easiest thing to use that you will ever encounter on the Internet. This simplicity is a large part of why it has been adopted and why its subtle power is so misunderstood. Sending an article link to a friend via email is so 2007. Many sites now have “share this” capabilities built into their pages that allow readers to share an article with a friend. Stop using that method. With the inclusion of services like Twitter, the previously humble “share this” process has morphed into a content distribution system that has instant reach to all 7 million Twitter users, instantly—at no cost to the publisher. Share it via Twitter for a far better reach. The key to expanding your reach is by gaining “followers” on Twitter. Unlike Chat or IM, anything that you tweet—with the exception of a direct message to another Twitter user—is socialized with the entire Twitter community. Folks who have chosen to “follow” you on Twitter—by clicking on the follow button on your profile or using an autofollow service—are more likely to take notice. Not everyone will. Some people follow 10 other people, some follow thousands, but many people use search terms to isolate and highlight tweets pertaining to certain topics. Tools and techniques have been developed by the community to make Twitter more manageable, given the tremendous volume of tweets generated every second. The most common method of search filtering is the use of so-called hash tags, or words preceded by a # sign. Flagging words in this manner makes them eminently searchable, and some Twitterers, in an effort to attract more attention to their tweets, use hash tags in practically all of their posts. Think of Twitter as a social search engine. The good news for publishers in all of this is that many “Tweeple” consider themselves amateur journos who pride themselves on their skills as newshounds. Needless to say, most of the news they produce is repurposed, all the better for publishers. Tweeple are self-described and anointed influentials who share news, articles and editorials compulsively with friends and acquaintances alike. Next to silly comments about what Tweeple are having for lunch, the next most popular thing is to post links to articles on the Web. If you harness their natural inclination to share—and that may mean breaking down some of your content protection barriers—you will see your followers post links to your article almost as soon as it has been written and posted on your Web site. Twitter can drive more impressions and registrations for your ad or subscription-supported site if you let it work its magic. Cultivating a community of followers by posting news feeds from your site will grow your legion of Twitter followers. Consider posting promotional articles on Twitter that are freely accessible regardless of subscription status. You’ll encounter new readers and, quite probably, new subscribers. Dave Hendricks is EVP, strategy and planning, Datran Media. He is one of our Minsider columnists, industry leaders who sound off regularly at minonline. If you have breaking news to share please contact Steve Smith at ssmith@accessintel.com COMMENTS
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Also - minonline would get more comments if you allow commentators to link their name to a site!