Twitter Business Models: Push vs Pull
If you’re like most people that use Twitter, your main purpose is to update the world (or your 100 or so followers) what you’re doing at any given time. Perhaps just below that in importance is to see what all of your followers are doing, reading, writing, etc. These are both “push” techniques, since users are “pushing” their content to you, and you are pushing your content to your followers. This works extremely well for the majority of Twitter users.
How about the other end, the “pull” part? If you perform a search, you pull all the tweets that contain that keyword. Using the Twitter API, you can come up with a lot more uses by pulling in content from the Twitter stream. The average user likely won’t ever need to use the API, and probably not much more than an occasional search.
What’s the point of this post? The groups that can benefit the most from pulling Twitter content are businesses. When you read about social media advertising, it appears that most companies follow a common set of procedures:
1. create a Twitter account
2. tweet about your product and amass followers
3. push ads and specials on those followers to entice them to buy more products
Sure, this might pick up some sales, but this is also extremely difficult to measure in terms of ROI. Most companies don’t have social media campaigns for this very reason.
What is a better method? Think back to the fundamental rule of sales, product development, and customer service: listen to your customer! If you are a company on Twitter, don’t just send out a general question soliciting feedback from your followers. Only the people with very strong opinions will respond, and that will not help the company reach the other 95% of your audience. Instead, take the time to actually read through the tweet of your followers; see what they are interested in. Don’t have the time? Write a script using the API to pull in the tweets from your followers that mention your company or specific keywords. Then you can understand your customers’ interests, engage in a converstation with them, and you may just have a customer for life.