A Crazy Lesson I Learned on Oscar Night

The Oscars were last night. My wife and I celebrated by hooking up her laptop to the TV, starting the Oscar Livestream (we don’t have “normal” TV), and livetweeting the whole thing.

It was good fun. We loved reading the jabs at Neil Patrick Harris’s dad jokes or instant memification of creepy John Travolta:

But the most important takeaway from last night was a powerful lesson I learned about social media marketing.

In fact, what I saw completely changed what I’m going to recommend to my clients in the future.

It has to do with how Twitter works, and it should change how small businesses approach social media.

Ready?

Here it is: Unless you have a big budget or infinite time to spend on Twitter, it’s best to stay away from it as a promotional platform.

Why?

Because tweets have a terribly short lifespan.

This piece from readwrite says the majority of Twitter action happens in the first hour of a tweet’s life.

This more recent article from Wisemetrics argues a tweet’s average lifespan is even shorter, lasting only a few minutes. For your science enthusiasts out there, that gives tweets a half-life a billion times shorter than Carbon-14’s.

Yikes.

So what should small business owners do about Twitter?

In my opinion, nothing: ignore it… unless your business matches a very specific set of guidelines.

(I’ll be going over when your business should and shouldn’t use Twitter in the next issue of the TL;DR Digital Marketing Report, including free tools you can use to analyze your customers’ twitter profiles. These tools can let you know in seconds whether Twitter is worth your time as a business or not.)

If your business DOES match the profile of one that would thrive on Twitter…

…You have to know how to reach them.

Stay tuned for strong Twitter strategies soon.