Moving Beyond Twitter

So, you finally figured out twitter, set Tweedeck up on your desktop to manage your feed and monitor chatter. You have begun using analytics to measure traffic and have figured out how to best utilize landing pages to capture leads or sell your products. You have figured out who to follow and have begun adding your twitter link on your email signatures, your corporate site and blogs. 

But what happens if twitter becomes Friendster, Myspace or even Classmates? Tools that were once thought to be sure ways to speak directly  to your audience that were quickly eclipsed by the next big thing, facebook. That does not mean that facebook is going to go away or even twitter for that matter, but you would be best served to see where else your audience might be.

If you have figured out twitter you should also look at Plurk or identi.ca? These two micro blogs also utilize 140 character messaging. Plurk uses a timeline which is a nice feature to easily go back and find old messages if you remember when they were posted, however this same feature can seem kind of annoying and cumbersome to people that are familiar to the twitter feed. Identi.ca allows people to join or create groups that let  you find and talk to others with similar interests. While I find this to be a cool function for identi.ca, the web interface is a lot more cluttered than twitter and there are not enough applications created at this point to effectively utilize this like twitter.

But moving beyond twitter means moving your social media strategy beyond mini blogging too. Creating a full corporate blog that can be linked through twitter, creating landing pages on your site that can be linked, linking to content on your site like white papers or newsletter articles... these are only scratching the surface. You need to evaluate all the tools available to you.

Do you have videos that you want to share with the public, then create a YouTube channel. Creating a channel offers another venue for you to craft specific messages to share with your audience. But YouTube is not the only game in town. If you have videos you will also want to look at 12seconds for short video updates, DailyMotion, Seesmic, and Vimeo. Another place you can post your video is facebook.

Facebook has risen to the top versus Myspace and the creation of fan pages has allowed corporations a spot on the powerful networking tool. Facebook allows you to post videos and other content to your page. You can promote events and webinars on your page and you can send messages directly to everyone that has opted in as a fan on your page. It allows you another source to link your twitter, Plurk and identi.ca feeds too.

Another piece of the pie is social bookmarking and news feeds. If you have content on your blogs or your corporate site that you want to drive additional traffic too then make sure you have it linked on some of the most popular sites, including: digg, reddit, delicious, diigo, Mister Wong, StumbleUpon and Twine.

The last thing I want to focus on is FriendFeed. If you are not familiar with FriendFeed then you should make yourself familiar. FF is a tool that aggregates all of your individual social media tools (including all of the ones I have listed in this piece) and allows you to gather all of your feeds in one place. A great feature for marketers includes the ability to create rooms. These rooms are basically a place where people of a shared interests come together to share content and comments. It is a good place for marketers to either create a group based on their product or service, or something aligned to their field. It also is a place to find users of the other social media tools who have opted in to a room that natters to your organization. It also aggregates all of your feeds for your friends to see in one place. If you post something to reddit its here, same thing for YouTube, twitter or any of the other feeds you add to your page.

As you can see, social media is more and deeper than just facebook, LinkedIn and twitter - the safe havens for those trying to push campaigns in the office. What I ask you to do is look deeper, explore the other tools available. You never know when you might be a trailblazer, and you never know when the tool you base your campaign around has become obsolete.