I give lots of social media marketing presentations to individuals and organizations. Many of them are perplexed about Twitter. It’s understandable. I often compare getting started on Twitter to untangling a ball of string. You keep turning and rotating, looking for a good spot to get started. Twitter is a similar enigma. It’s hard to build an audience without a good understand of the medium. But it’s hard to gain an understanding of the medium without an audience.
Yesterday morning, Twitter went on the Today show to announce their new design. I didn’t find anything particularly compelling about the announcement because, for the most part, they’re simply playing catch-up with Facebook and Google+. However, what I did find interesting and very well done was a short video they produced titled Twitter: Yours to Discover. I think that it does a good job of concisely presenting Twitter n00bs with two important things:
- I think it does a good job of showing people what Twitter is all about; discovering and connecting. The most common thing you hear from people who don’t use or like Twitter is, “I don’t care what you had for breakfast.” My response to that is, “If that’s what you see in your stream then you’re following the wrong people.” The video illustrates this well.
- It also introduces some of the nuts and bolts that hold it together, like hashtags, replies, favorites and search. It’s not a two minute tutorial but gives users a quick glimpse at how it all works.
