Twitter Stops The Litter Across The Search And Social Divide.
Relevant messaging to the relevant audience on the right channel. It’s a key principle that runs right through today’s multichannel online marketing where it’s important to identify and engage the interest of specific niche segment followers.
The news at the end of June that Twitter users will no longer be able to display their tweets at the LinkedIn site not only reinforces the different approach needed between the two social networking sites, but quite rightly questions the use of mass auto messaging.
Getting your social media content and distribution right has become a hot issue. Recent Google algorithm updates in the guise of Panda and Penguin continue the endless battle against spam links and poor content sites. The move by Twitter to end the Application Programming Interface (API) for LinkedIn, suggests a similar focus on cutting out the free rein – and the spam – that the Twitter API had given users to create and share their own and other tweets since 2009. There is also likely to be a knock-on effect at sites like Hootsuite, etc. ( It’s important to point out that you can still maintain your usual Twitter stream at LinkedIn).
It might seem a retrograde step for a social networking site that celebrated its sixth birthday in March 2012 with the announcement that it has 140 million users who send 340 million tweets per day. But sharing content on the multichannel gets mightily noisy.
In reality, eCommerce and other online business who just jump in the search and social whirlpool, spraying a relentless stream of identical messages across the networks of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are not making a big splash. Reading like auto spam bots, they’re simply seen as inappropriate, intrusive, and mostly ignored.
It’s a misunderstanding of the search and social principle of social networking content as simply being cheap and cheerful promotional marketing strategies with a “ let’s get our message out there to as many people as we can” mindset.
Twitter claim they are simply protecting the user experience across the web in social – in the same way as Google does in search. Ultimately, of course they look to preserve their service monetisation from the spammers. But it is a further signpost to the way the web is evolving to maintain key user functions, expectations and experiences.
Site owners are once more reminded that social link building and content creation are always a relevant response to specific individual need that now both search engines and social sites are increasingly demanding.