There are a lot of social agencies that swear by the Twitter chat – it builds thought leadership and increases your brand awareness and lets you interact with your customers and/or leads. While that’s not totally untrue, a lot of these Twitter chats are hosted by and for B2B brands and I’m of the camp that sees very little value from them. Here’s why:
The conversation flows too quickly for real conversation.
When you have too many followers chirping in about complex topics (marketing immediately comes to mind since many Twitter chats are hosted by marketing and comms organizations), you get two things: a rapidly moving conversation (50+ new tweets every time you refresh) and very surface-level comments.
What does this ultimately mean? It means that instead of actually getting any valuable information (which can rarely be fit inside of 140 characters), you get small chunks of useless information – a lot of which is ignored to account for the deluge of additional useless tweets coming in, which leads me to my next point…
Very few Twitter chats provide actual value.
Look at any Twitter chat, and you’ll notice two things immediately: there’s a moderator asking questions and trying to keep everyone on topic, and there’s a host of people re-tweeting every question and every actual answer. The culprits are usually companies who want to take advantage of a targeted group of Twitter users, but don’t actually have anything of value to add and/or too lazy to actually participate so they create the illusion of participating by creating a lot of content consisting of absolutely nothing.
This just adds to the deluge of crap.
What do you get when you combine a lot of repetitive content with a lot of small chunks of content that offer no value-add? You get crap. The condensed version of spam blogs that re-hash and republish whatever they can to create an illusion of actually saying something.
What do you think? Do you participate in Twitter chats? Do you find actual value in them? Have you found it a way to actually learn something or do you see it as a way to introduce yourself to and interact with others in your field? Let me know!