What’s the point of Twitter?

Why do I need to use Twitter?

Why do you use Twitter?

What am I missing by not using Twitter?

What do you want to do with your life Twitter?

The reason so many people are having trouble figuring out the value of Twitter is that they haven’t chosen to use Twitter with a particular goal in mind. They have chosen to use it out of curiosity, or because they wonder what they must be missing.  Some of my friends and colleagues resemble that remark, and given the recent mainstream media attention thrust upon Twitter, I expect the number of curious people trying to figure out what the fuss is about will continue to skyrocket.

So they create an account, follow some of their favorite celebrities, follow some of the news sources they already read elsewhere, follow the friends they already talk to on a regular basis, and sit back to wait for the magic.

In order to score, you need a goal

Other commenters on the aforementioned LinkedIn discussion (and elsewhere) mentioned some great goals that you might set for yourself as you start using Twitter:

• market research
• brand monitoring
• customer community building & interaction
• personal “brand” building
• subject-matter networking

If none of these activities are things you are already trying to do well, or are embarking upon as something you want to do well (with or without Twitter), then perhaps Twitter is not a tool you will find valuable. If you’re not trying to bid on merchandise that you’re going to buy sight-unseen and have shipped to you, then eBay probably isn’t for you either.

Goal-oriented Participation Creates Value

With Twitter, the reason knowing your goals is so directly related to the value you derive from using Twitter is that those goals influence your own activity and participation. Those goals will also influence the tools you choose (there are many different Twitter applications available, both free and paid).

The crux of Twitter is that it is a conduit for infinite conversation. Think of it as a giant ball of millions of strands of yarn. Some of those strands are people, some are topics, some are companies. It takes a little while to:

1. build your own strand for people to follow if they choose to, and
2. tease out the strands that you’d like to follow.

But ultimately, you need to do both: contribute value through constant development of your own strand, and derive value from the strands of others.

As it turns out, Day 1 of the campaign couldn’t have picked a better social media property to feature as it’s homepage. Nobody loves to gossip and spread the wildfire word more passionately than Twitterers. There isn’t a doubt in my mind that they maximized their Day 1 exposure by featuring Twitter first, instead of Facebook or Digg or YouTube or _______.

The brilliance of the strategy starts to become a little more obvious now that the flash-in-the-pan craze so common on Twitter has faded, and Skittles.com Day 2 is featuring the less frantic Facebook page as its homepage. A little less rapid-fire, a little more dialogue (with ‘Skittles’ posting responses to comments on its own wall). They’ve used the 24-hour Twitter stampede as kindling for a fire that is now burning bigger today than it was yesterday.

This is the inverse of peeling back the layers of the onion. They’ve recognized the lifespan of buzz on various social media outlets, and are chaining properties together in the campaign to leverage one property as a build into the next.  This is a great example of leveraging the Snowball Effect of social media to make the overall impact of the campaign greater than the sum of its parts.

Twitterverse, don’t be so quick to evaluate the merits of this campaign. You are merely the first pawn to be moved in a much longer, more strategic game of chess.