What is micro-blogging?

“Micro-blogging merges the one to-many broadcast model of blogging with an immersive network model like Facebook. It allows users to stay in touch with a large number of friends, but avoids information overload by limiting the size of each update. In Twitter’s case, this is 140 characters, or just a little bit less than a SMS”. (Ng. K, 2008)

Twitter is a micro-blogging website to explode onto the scene back in 2006 growing to over 302 million active monthly users by 2015 (Twitter, 2015). Twitter is the single biggest (most popular) micro-blogging site in the world today (Timely, 2015). It’s main competitors are ‘Google+’, ‘Friend Feed’ and ‘Tumblr’.

In recent years micro-blogs have taken off and become among the most influential and popular social entities available. The number of Twitter users, increased from 94,000 in 2007 to 200 million in 2010 and further to 517 million before July 1, 2012 (Semiocast, 2012). Twitter users post one billion messages in merely one week (Damak et al., 2011).

High PR Micro-blogging sites: (Liu, 2014)

NO.	WEBSITE URL	PR
1	twitter.com	10
2	google+	10
3	tumblr.com	8
4	friendfeed.com	8
5	plurk.com	7
6	yammer.com	7
7	dipity.com	7
8	flattr.com	7
9	dipity.com	7
10	yammer.com	7
11	identi.ca	6
12	tout.com	6
13	meetme.com	6
14	identi.ca	6
15	blip.pl	5
16	twitxr.com	5
17	mysay.com	5
18	heello.com	4
19	meemi.com	4
20	plerb.com	4
21	rememble.com	4

This table illustrates the fact that Twitter, Google+, Tumblr and Friend Feed are the biggest micro-blogging sites available.

 

So how does micro-blogging provide an opportunity for companies to market new products/services?

It is quite simple, companies can advertise new products with a simple ‘tweet’ (micro-blog) stating that a new product/service will be released in the coming time period, they can also provide short promotions (for a limited time only) to make consumers panic into grabbing a deal.

Advantages:

1. Buzz – Twitter in particular can create a real buzz when a company announces the launch of a new product or service, especially if it sounds interesting, this creates the ‘word-of-mouse’ phenomenon that has people sharing the information with each other (going viral) across social media and this is an extremely effective way to raise huge awareness of a product or service before it has even been released. (Ng. K, 2008)

2. Brand loyalty – “results from (Zhang. H, 2015) suggest that if users are committed to an enterprise micro-blog, develop a habit of following the micro-blog, and actively participate in the micro-blog, then they become loyal to the brand of the enterprise”.

3. Get closer to the customer – As with all marketing across social media it unquestionably helps a company to get closer to it’s customers as it can communicate with them directly, it is always a nice touch when you see a huge multi-national company tweet back to a customer comment whether it be with some banter or genuine information. Below is an example of two well known companies having some ‘Twitter Banter’:

4. Both customer praise and customer complaints can be analysed by companies to see what they are doing well and what areas need improvement. (Ng. K, 2008)

Limitations:

1. Followers – Everything is subjective to the amount of followers a Twitter (micro-blog) account has, obviously if a small company tries to advertise a product launch through a micro-blog the more followers they have, the more awareness and ‘buzz’ it could potentially create. Improving your following is one of the fundamentals of successful marketing across micro-blogs. (Burgess, 2015)

2. Word Limit – Twitter as mentioned sets a quite short word limit so this can make it difficult for companies to get the message across, this is why it is very important for them to be concise (Burgess, 2015). In my opinion it would defeat the object of micro-blogging if companies could advertise without constraint, keeping posts short is an effective way to keep them captivating and companies can be almost certain that the vast majority of people are going to read it all. (Ng. K, 2008)

3. Think before you spea… type – Even a huge company with a solid brand image and loyal following can lose a large proportion of followers in an instant if they post a message that is perhaps intended to be funny, but ends up being perceived as rude. For example Vodaphone gave itself a PR nightmare when a company subordinate posted an offensive, homophobic tweet from the official company twitter page – the employee was subsequently dismissed but the damage was already done (Bhasin. K, 2012). Building brand reputation is a long process, no company wants to see that go in reverse so they must be careful who has access to the page and the team in charge of tweeting should be a mix of different cultures to understand different perceptions.

 

How to gain followers for smaller (less established) companies:

 

Conclusions:

It is clear that Twitter is an ocean of potential customers similarly to other social media sites but a company has to tackle its marketing strategies across micro-blogging platforms slightly differently. If they are a smaller company they should focus on growing their followers for the initial stages of marketing because otherwise it is very difficult to reach out to the far corners of the digital sphere.

 

References:

Burgess, J. (2015). 7 Ways to Set Your Twitter Feed on Fire. [Blog] Entrepreneur. Available at: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/241789. Last Accessed 27th May 2015.

Damak, F., Jabeur, L.B., Cabanac, G., Pinel-Sauvagnat, K., Tamine, L. and Boughanem, M. (2011), “IRIT at TREC Microblog 2011”, TREC, Proceedings of the 20th Text Retrieval Conference, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD.

Feng Liu. (2014). List of High PR Microblogging Sites. Available: http://siteber.com/list-of-high-pr-microblogging-sites/. Last accessed 27th May 2015.

Kim Bhasin. (2012). 13 Epic Twitter Fails By Big Brands. Available: http://www.businessinsider.com/13-epic-twitter-fails-by-big-brands-2012-2?op=1&IR=T. Last accessed 27th May 2015.

Ng, K. 2008, Microblogging, Haymarket Business Publications Ltd, Hong Kong.

Semiocast (2012), “Twitter reaches half a billion accounts more than 140 millions in the US”, available at: http://semiocast.com/publications/2012_07_30_Twitter_reaches_half_a_ billion_accounts_140m_in_the_US. Last accessed 27th May 2015.

Thomas Timely. (2015). Top 10 Microblogging Sites. Available: http://www.gurugrounds.com/uncategorized/top-10-microblogging-sites/. Last accessed 27th May 2015.

Twitter. (2015). About Twitter. Available: https://about.twitter.com/company. Last accessed 27th May 2015.

Zhang, H., Zhang, K.Z.K., Lee, M.K.O. & Feng, F. 2015, “Brand loyalty in enterprise microblogs”, Information Technology & People, vol. 28, no. 2, pp. 304-326.