| Good Morning Michigan! Today is Tuesday, March 24, 2009.
 Tuesday 2.0 is here again already, and this week I'd like to talk about why I love the Twitter. Rather than yet another generic blog post about why Twitter rocks, I'll tell you why Twitter has rocked for BFM. So this is a little bit meta, but maybe it will help you understand 1) why you should be on Twitter and 2) why you should be on Twitter following us. :D
First of all, a note on why we started pushing the 2.0 services, which include Facebook, Twitter, the Newsletter, iTunes and the RSS feeds. Some of you may recall that BFM used to go offline a lot. Really. A lot. On one occasion, the Senate was in session and Bishop did done something dumb again, and when I tried to post it, the site was offline. At this point we decided that we could no longer tolerate this dependence on a single method of communication with our audience. The 2.0 tools were a solution to this problem.
Twitter was one of the first things we tried. Xavier introduced me to twitterfeed, which allows Twitter to update our status through the use of an RSS feed. In other words, Twitterfeed checks our RSS feed for updates at a pre-configured interval, and then publishes those updates through the Twitter account. As such, all of our diaries and blasts are broadcast to our 1,142 followers.
Then through the use of a Facebook Twitter application, Twitter updates our Facebook status with each update that it receives. In short, whatever is sent to Twitter is also sent to our 300+ friends on Facebook. Ultimately, Twitter is responsible for getting our headlines in front of over 1,000 people, most of whom aren't hitting our site each day. (I say "over 1,000" people because some of the Facebook people are following us on Twitter too) In this regard, Twitter has been the best performing tool for increasing our audience.
I've toyed with using Twitter to update our currently dormant MySpace account (where our only friend is Tom,) but I hate MySpace so much that I'm not sure if I care if it works.
Not all 1,142 of our followers are actively engaged with our content. Some are just there to heckle, some are courtesy followers (we followed them, so they followed us) , and some are just there to have their names show up in our list (to pick up more followers for themselves). But we received a tremendous response from our live tweeting of the SotS, and I feel good about our follower to engaged follower ratio.
Twitter has also helped me pick up news fast, get new ideas for content, and meet some interesting people. I make it a point to watch the tweets from mlive, cnn, Anderson Cooper, and so on. I also follow our elected officials who have the guts to tweet.
So in a nutshell, Twitter -
- Provides an alternate method of communication with our established audience
- Expands our reach to people who are not in our regular web audience
- Let's us follow the headlines and the comments of the people we deem relevant
- Has given me new ideas for content at BFM.
At this point I really can't imagine BFM without Twitter.
Today In History:
1882 - The tuberculosis germ was discovered.
1941 - Glenn Miller began work on Sun Valley Serenade.
1955 - Cat on a Hot Tin Roof opened on Broadway. It ran for 694 shows and won the Critics' Circle Award as the Best American Play.
1958 - Elvis Presley reported to local draft board 86 in Memphis, TN. The US Govt lost an estimated $500,000 in taxes each year that Private Presley was in the Army.
1989 - The Exxon Valdez, a 987-foot supertanker loaded with 1,264,155 barrels of North Slope crude oil, ran aground on Bligh Reef in Prince William Sound, Alaska. 11.2 million gallons of oil spilled into the sea.
There's more ... |
