PR and Twitter - Why We Should “Make Time”
So, are you on Twitter? It's a question I pose every time I'm doing a consultation with a PR company. Yesterday in Leeds, for example, I met with around a dozen people throughout the day and the query was almost uniformly met with a sheepish grin or a roll of the eyes followed by protestations of time pressures or uncertainty as to what exactly the point of it all is. "What tangible benefits do you get out of it?" they counter. Here are some examples.
In December I was taken on by fantastic up and coming soul/country Bristol band Phantom Limb to build their following and "explore opportunities" during their support to Will Young on a national tour. Late one night I saw a retweet of something Boy George had said and a dim bell went off somewhere in my memory banks - I remembered an old interview in which he talked about his love of both soul and country music, so I whacked off a tweet to him: "Hi George, can I turn you on to this band? @phantomlimbband - what do you think?"
Less than five minutes came the rapturous reply (to his 34k+ followers): "I LOVE IT - I have just downloaded Draw The Line from iTunes and I suggest you all do the same!" Cue a huge spike in download sales of the single. He posted several further extremely complimentary tweets, mentioned the band in an interview with Sky TV and last month, when he appeared on Alan Carr's Chatty Man chat show, George made his entrance to Draw The Line. All this from one tweet. Sure, there was luck involved, but any decent hack will tell you that you make your own luck. It wouldn't have happened if the band hadn't had a Twitter presence.
Other examples: www.twitter.com/lovefoodfest - an organic food festival run by a single mum, who admitted she was "on Twitter ... but only just", with a following of less than 90. She wanted to hook up with complementary businesses - food, health, lifestyle - but just didn't have the time to commit to building up her following or interacting therewith. She also expressed an interest in some media coverage, but only wanted a month's worth of activity. Within that month, she had a following of over 400 targeted folk, been added to 25 lists and invited to write a guest column for a woman's magazine. A handover meeting encouraged her she did not need to be on Twitter 24/7 to maintain her presence.
A random offer of a free project to my 900th follower led to an article in The Sun for www.twitter.com/arcticfarm, two entrepreneurial young lads who set up their own frozen yogurt business.
Since taking on www.twitter.com/blinkbox in February, their following has increased from under 100 to over 1,000 - mostly movie-centric people, leading to great word of mouth buzz.
I've banged on enough. The main reason people in PR don't use Twitter - and I've asked enough to have a pretty representative sample - is because they "don't have time". The received wisdom is that many people are unwilling to take new social platforms on board once they have committed to, say, Facebook or LinkedIn. They visualise valuable chunks of their time being eaten up by yet another format they have to maintain. But it needn't be that way at all. It need not necessarily require massive commitment.
Being "on Twitter" does require a little more effort than just typing "trying out this Twitter thing!!!" in July 2009 and following Stephen Fry. But as little as 30 minutes a day is enough to add to your following, dip in and out of conversations, learn something, "meet" useful people in your field ... and maybe even have Boy George big you up.
Written by Jay Williams
72Point Blog
72 Point are national news PR & survey specialists. Achieving daily print & online news exposure for the UK’s largest brands and PR agencies.
May 17th, 2010 - 09:27
I disagree, being on twitter does consume a lot of time at first before you’ve figured it out or unless you have someone to guide you through the initial phase. But if you manage to use it in a proper way it is a definite ROI in the time spent there.