Fast-Tracking to Twitter

Back in February I mused about the apparent greater willingness of companies to sign up for Twitter than to start blogs. I’ll go one further now – I’m starting to see companies skip blogging entirely and go straight to Twitter.

Companies like Fairmont Hotels are by-passing blogging entirely and starting to engage with Twitter as an initial step into social media. Until recently it might have appeared more logical to suggest blogging as a common core step in the social media process (listen, engage, develop) once the groundwork is laid. Nowadays that’s not necessarily the case.

If we consider the different apparent commitment levels of the two tools this isn’t too surprising:

• Blogs require designing and developing; a Twitter profile has a minimum of setup;
• Blog posts can take lots of time to draft and edit; Twitter posts can take just a few seconds;
• It can take a while to start to develop conversations on a blog; on Twitter you can begin to engage in conversations very quickly;
• As a real-time medium, conversations evolve and spread more quickly on Twitter than on all but the most popular blogs.

Some of these commitment differences are perceived rather than real – you can spend just as much time on Twitter each day as it takes to write a blog post, for example. Still, I find it interesting that Twitter is now sufficiently accepted that it is seen as a potential first step into social media.