What’s Your 140 Character Pitch?
Posted by Mike on
November 14, 2008
Much has been made in the blogosphere about using Twitter for business. Twitter, you will recall, is a micro-blogging site that limits your posts to 140 characters. People use it for anything from telling everyone what they ate for lunch to asking for advice to pointing people to interesting websites. Rich Brooks and Lynelle Wilson, both fellow MaineBusiness bloggers, have both written extensively on the topic.
I admit it. On this, I was a slow adopter. I just started using twitter a couple of weeks ago, even though I signed up long before that. I just didn’t get it. Why would anyone want to constantly update everyone on themselves? Sounded a bit too narcissistic to me. My brother and business partner jumped into twitter with both feet in August. When we started getting customers as a direct result, I finally figured it out. We were in the midst of another paradigm shift in internet marketing.
This article in Wired Magazine says that blogs are ’so 2004.’ That’s because back in 2004, blogs were an even playing field. Anyone could write one, and your content could be found by the search engines fairly easily. Nowadays, professional blogging sites like Huffington post have pushed aside the little guy. Their content is updated many times per day, snuffing out those little once-a-week posters. This concept is true across blogging types- personal, political, and business. Twitter, with its 140 character limit, once again puts everyone on an even playing field.
John Jantsch, a respected marketing blogger, wrote a blog (and subsequent ebook) about internet marketing. In the article, he uses Maslow’s Hierarchy of human nature and puts in a business’ “internet marketing” needs. On the bottom of the triangle is blogging, while micro-blogging, like twitter, is placed at the top. He claims that it wont make sense to use social sites unless you are blogging, and that mirco-blogging will only make sense to the most advanced social-media small business owners.
With respect to John’s accomplishments in internet marketing, he is wrong on this. This restaurant in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, doesn’t blog or anything- they don’t even have a website- but they have successfully used twitter to market themselves on the Internet. The beauty of the shift to micro-blogging is that you don’t need to know how to do anything else. Internet Marketing cannot be compared to a triangle. It is circular, and how much of the circle you use for any given avenue of exposure will depend on your social media strategy.
I’m not ready to give up blogging just yet. I enjoy writing, and I still like to produce valuable, varied content for visitors to my website. But I do intend to increase my usage on twitter, and have a more focused social media strategy.
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