Oh Twitter, How I Once Loved Thee

I’ve never purported myself as a social media expert, however, I’ve always made an effort to understand how all social media channels work so that, when appropriate, I could work with organizations and clients to leverage these channels. 

During the advent of social media, I worked in educational publishing, mostly higher ed and professional, and aligned business. This was about 20 years ago, and publishing was not a digital first vertical. I’ll never forget being told that we shouldn’t bother emailing history professors because they expect printed letters. While this was likely the case for some, communicating basically the way we always had is never a promising marketing strategy. 

It was at this point that I also began an MBA program and started to understand marketing from an academic standpoint rather than just applicable and experiential, which had gotten me far. A mainstay marketing tenant that I learned and have thought about ever since is the understanding of push vs. pull marketing. 

Push marketing used and continues to use traditional marketing channels to promote services and products. Of course, product developers will have taken time to understand market needs, opportunities, and deficits, and may also use differentiated persona-based messaging and channels – all communication is outbound or pushed, and conversations should be faster and more transactional. Pull marketing marries many push tactics with more engagement activities, like polls, or asks for followers, many points of connection that are commonplace with any social media experience. This type of marketing is still relatively new compared with traditional outreach. And, as it’s become painfully obvious, unless social media channels and platforms are well managed, they will flame out and become useless to marketers.

As we all know, X (formerly Twitter, which is how I’ll continue to refer to it), is one such platform. Twitter and Facebook were the two main channels I helped my teams and clients create presence on to help grow their brand, engage and attract customers and users, and listen to what was going on around them. At the time, many clients thought social media was for “young people” aka millennials (ha ha!) and not something they, young boomers and older GenX, even needed to understand, and I’m talking about EVPs or CMOs of enterprise organizations whose end users were young millennials. These leaders understood LinkedIn, could toy around with Facebook and would use it personally, but did not get Twitter and laughed at the idea of tweeting. When I proposed integrating social media into an integrated marketing strategy and specifically a brand building and thought leadership building plan, I explained the three channels with these analogies: 

LinkedIn is the business network meeting place, it’s very demure, very modest, and professional.

Facebook is like the neighborhood, pta, or family get together, it’s familiar, photo-centric, and conversational.

Twitter is the party, the party you want to be at. There’s a lot going on, you can be a wallflower, listen and learn a lot, and you can also be the social butterfly and engage with anyone you want to, any person, any brand. And do it all in real time. 

I will never forget once live tweeting a conference presentation and someone presented something about a burgeoning digital education product that had links to Microsoft. I tag Microsoft in the tweet and within minutes they liked the tweet and commented. This type of brand/customer engagement might seem commonplace now, but at the time it was revolutionary. 

Social media marketing was and continues to be inexpensive compared to traditional marketing. Geo-targeting is not unique to Google Ads or digital marketing. You’ve always been able to denote specific locations and customer persona types with traditional marketing, think small newspaper ads, billboards, direct mail. But digital marketing, through social channels or Google Ads and the like, is much much much less expensive, trackable, and easy to update in response to engagement. And this is where I really miss the Twitter of yore. 

Once upon a time, social media platforms had real live people who specialized in specific business verticals to work with on campaigns. For a couple of years, I worked with someone at Twitter who specialized in the education space and helped me not only set up campaigns but was available to speak with and ask questions. Social media networking turned into a human-to-human business relationship. This type of engagement does not exist today – everything is digital, mostly easy-to-use, more cost effective, but the experience is missing a personal connection that can only happen when you work with a person. I miss this connection. 

There is a silver lining. With Twitter now as X, being what it is, there’s an open space and an opportunity for a smart and savvy disruptor to fill it out. Threads is not it – it still doesn’t offer as many features Twitter has, though it does give you a few seconds to edit a post, which is a win. Nonetheless, Threads is underwhelming. Tik Tok is fun, terribly addictive, extremely transactional and searchable (which is threatening to other search monoliths), but it’s also a bit too much, obviously video dependent, and who knows if we’ll have access to it in a year. So, there’s room for my dream social media networking platform: 

• Take the original Twitter.

• Allow for anytime post editing.

• Drive revenue with ads and surcharge pricing for in-person guidance. 

• Never go public, instead of kowtowing to stockholders and continuously trying to add unnecessary features just pay for superlative talent.

• Employ pull marketing, listen to your customers, understand their needs, and always put them ahead of the owner of the platform.