Even Though We Say Social Media, Mostly We Mean Twitter

I admit, I stole the title of this post from Chris Brogan. He probably won’t mind since he’s spouting smart stuff all the time on Twitter.

The point was driven home by a tweet I saw from Pistachio which talked about the LA Times having 99 Twitter accounts. Since I have been pushing for McClatchy to define a social media strategy for our papers, it hit me like a ton of bricks. My first question was if the accounts were just headline dumps or real people interacting.

Andrew Nystrom was quick to jump to his paper’s defense:

Of 99 http://latimes.com/tweets accounts, ~1/2 are non-RSS. Goal is to get all mostly human-powered asap.

All 99 @latimes accts at http://latimes.com/tweets are ‘official’ per se; some individual streams may mix personal + professional.

I tossed out one more quick question, asking if the accounts were mandated by the management, or if the bubbled up from the hoi polloi?

Bottom-up, based 100% on reader input. See http://tr.im/hly7 interview by @jayrosen_nyu‘s @MsBeat + http://latimes.com/sm for details.

This is the type of thing that gives me hope. Newspapers get it! Not so much mine, but still, the LA Times is indeed a newspaper that seems to understand that they are there for the public, not the other way around.

Twitter is the hottest cog in the social media engine right now. The latest numbers from Nielsen Online indicate that Twitter grew 1,382% year-over-year in February, registering a total of just more than 7 million unique visitors in the US for the month.

The power of Twitter is the way it lets you segment your audience. It’s a combination search engine, blog pulse taker, social media ticker, and instant feedback thermometer.

If your business isn’t leveraging Twitter, you do so at your own risk.