As you can see from the badge on our Internet Marketing Blog page, we use Twitter as a marketing and communications tool. We also use it for fun, or just to shoot the breeze. @GILL_Media has proven to be an extraordinarily successful effort, especially in the way it helped moderate the possible traffic effects of our total website redesign.
Our approach to Twitter has been from the perspective of a basic user. Instead of manically adding tons of people to try and hit key social hubs through brute force, we’ve gone with a growth pattern based on three pillars:
Courtesy: Did you add us? If you’re interesting and fit our tastes, we’ll add you! We’re flexible, so even if your shtick isn’t what we look for we’ll still read. We just draw the line at stuff we really don’t want to be connected with. (We never deal with adult content, for example, so no matter how nice you are we’re not going to connect.) The key is that we’re there to interact, to respond instead of just blindly Tweet, and to expand our perspective by monitoring the massive tide of content streaming by.
On Topic Interest: Naturally, we want to read about the musings of other marketing and internet services pros. There are situations in which we can be utterly, ferociously competitive, but instead of standing alone we want to use that as the basis for community building. A shared interest is a shared interest, after all. The spirit of sharing makes us all better competitors, helps us identify niches that let us stand apart from one another and elevates the common standard of practice – and that’s good for clients. Plus, Twitter is great for monitoring developments in manageable bites, instead of big infodumps.
Off Topic Interest: We’ve added plenty of people who didn’t add us and aren’t marketing related. This fits our basic user orientation. We want to understand Twitter’s casual use. Plus, it would be as interesting if we just looked at marketing and web design posts all day.
About the “Royal We:†We have to admit, we’re committing one of the great social media “sins†by referring to ourselves in the plural, but there’s a good reason for that. The individual, conversation-oriented nature of Twitter is all well and good, but at GILL Media we’re also a team. Most social media strategists tell you to put your face and individual voice front and center to humanize an otherwise cold, collective corporate persona. For us, though social media is inherently like that already. Individual contribution is the default. We want you to know that even though one guy’s threading together our activity into 140 character bursts, the rest of the team always stands behind them.
Next time, we’ll move from adding people to content. See you then!
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