Are today’s tweets tomorrow’s chip paper?
There is no denying that Twitter is an incredibly powerful tool. Everybody has a twitter account, from the Queen to Barack Obama, the whole world is using Twitter to communicate. When there is big news, it breaks first on Twitter. If there is a celebrity announcement, it is announced on Twitter. It is even used as a way of communicating directly to huge companies like EE or British Airways to review or complain.
It is also true that Twitter has become an incredibly effective and powerful tool within the marketing world, allowing for increased communication, free advertising and promotion, instant market research and an incredibly effective way of spreading the word.
But what happens to your tweets after you’ve tweeted them?
They do, of course, stay on your timeline but is anybody really seeing them? As soon as you tweet again, your first tweet is bumped down, and then again and again and again until the chances of somebody seeing it are next to nothing.
So maybe the old saying ‘today’s news is tomorrow’s chip paper’ as yesterday’s front page news is forgotten in place of another gripping headline, is true on social media as well? Your headline or tweet has an instant impact until it is replaced by another, more interesting snippet of information the following day.
Unless a tweet is pinned to the top it gets lost amongst your other tweets. That great, clever, witty and ingenious tweet you came up with yesterday is gone, replaced by today’s offering until the same happens again tomorrow.
Twitter marketing has to be instant then. You have to time it just right to make sure the most possible twitter users see your tweet before it slides down their timeline.
You could say that social media has replaced newspapers as the public’s great source of information, but in reality, the two aren’t all that different.