Twitter? Can this social platform be leveraged for media?

t’s phenomenal how social platforms just explode in user numbers. According to Nielsen Online, Twitter was the fastest growing web brand in May 2009 with 1,448% year-on–year growth. The figures went from 1.2 million unique browsers in 2008 compared to 18.2 million at present.

I must admit that I was a little slow on the up-take. I remember attending a media conference a couple of months ago and I watched how people were tweeting while listening to industry speakers. Even our very own CEO, Josh Adler, started leveraging Twitter for his group of followers and effectively making use of the platform to voice his opinion on industry issues and activities. So I decided to investigate and determine: “what is Twitter?”

The question that is consuming our thoughts at Prefix HQ is how can Twitter be optimally utilised in a publishing environment? We know that all social platforms build communities around a common interest, but how can these communities translate into valuable mediums to share quality, monetisable content? The jury is still out.

The clear benefit that journalists can derive from Twitter is as a research source. For instance, following real time commentary during a natural disaster on which to build quality reporting and analysis. ReadWriteWeb reported that a major earth quake in Mexico was covered on Twitter several minutes before being reported by the U.S. Geological Survey. Interesting…

For the Media houses, this platform can effectively be used to fetch people and contribute to traffic numbers. I for one find it easier to consume the bite-size length of content on Twitter to keep informed of headlines and most times be drawn to the portal for the detail of the article.

For readers, Twitter is an informative platform that allows users to follow a group of people, a brand, an issue or an important event in real-time. The Confederation Cup for instance with the issue about banning the “Vuvusela” from the games was widely discussed with literally hundreds of tweets from array of nationalities. Very amusing I may add.

As content management and delivery experts we will keep on investigating and debating how we should best leverage this platform for publishers. We will consult with our clients as they experiment with various ideas and monitor results…

(Paulo Moreira is business development manager @ Prefix)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 8th, 2009 at 9:40 am and is filed under Content Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.