Social Networks for Short Attention Spans? - Wave of the Future?
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You’re probably wondering how this is relevant to your SEO efforts. Well, social networking – when harnessed correctly – has been one of the tools in an SEO’s bag of tricks for quite some time now. Therefore, any change in the social networking landscape, or mutation to its form, is of interest. But there may be more going on than meets the eye.
David Berlind recently wrote a piece for ZDNet about the “Twitterization” of mainstream media. He saw firsthand how many magazines gave way to their online versions when they ceased to be profitable, and how the Internet turned into “a way to deliver blogged content to our audience members any way they like it – as text, still images, audio (podcasted or streamed), and/or video.” He sees Twitter, Pownce, and similar services as the next wave.
That’s all well and good, but what exactly does he mean by this? Berlind compares Twitter to blogging, in the sense that blogging made it easier for lots of people to publish content on the web without having to be computer programmers or even technologically savvy. He then explained how investors subscribe to services offered by Bloomberg or Reuters that give them one-line bits of news that are of interest to them. “In other words, if there is a reporter at a financial briefing for some public company and an executive of that company makes an important forward looking statement, that statement will appear on the consoles of thousands of investors within seconds of it being uttered,” Berlind elaborated.
How hard would it be for a savvy Twitter user – or a bunch of them – to start publishing “useful, timely, and material information” that investors might choose to follow as RSS feeds in the same way that they follow these subscription-only services? Before you say that this is absurd, consider the fact that bloggers have stolen a march on more traditional media more than once. For content producers, especially old media, this means being prepared to repackage your content so that it fits into a one-liner format.
It could be something as simple as a teaser for an article with a URL to the full piece. Or if you have an item that is too short to turn into a full article, you could sum it up as a one-liner and send it out to interested people as a sort of feed through Twitter or some other service. Any reporter gets far more press releases through email than he or she can use. Microblogging can be a way to capitalize on these items that would otherwise be lost. It’s another opportunity to give your audience the kind of content they want, and keep them engaged with your brand.
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