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Adult education centres across UK will soon offer Twitter classes

Credit where credit is due.  Inspired by Scott Thompson’s blog about Twitter lessons, which he in turn got after the excellent piece in this week’s The i, Twitter is apparently about to reach such levels of mainstream adoption that classes will shortly be offered at one’s local adult education centre.  Along with upholstery and conversational Italian!

Maybe that’s a bit too far for now, but lessons in social media are all the rage…..

I have myself conducted a Twitter class of this type for one client to teach them the basics of what it was and how to use it.  It was an interesting experience because it brought to light that the biggest issue concerning the use of social media, which is also touched upon by both Scott and the other article’s authors.

Learning how to use Twitter is the easy bit, but the thing that many companies fail to understand is ‘why they should be/are using it’. What’s their end goal?

Yes it is a fantastic broadcasting medium for reaching new audiences but that falls well short of Twitter’s potential. It’s also excellent for research and customer service and for giving a brand a clear personality etc etc as many have already documented in other articles.  Most clients however fail to establish a clear objective for their use of Twitter beyond the ‘we are just doing it to keep up with the Joneses’ strategy.  I guess it is better than the alternative ‘not keeping up with the Joneses’ but somehow they are missing a fantastic engagement and data mining opportunity along the way.

The fact that Twitter (and any other social media) is time consuming means it is often relegated to become a job for the PR agency and overlooked by the key people within the business.  In my book that’s a big mistake.  I believe the most beneficial way smaller businesses in particular, who often lack the resources to dedicate to social media can benefit from using Twitter, is to work in partnership with their PR team and share the workload, with each having clear objectives in mind for their own individual contributions.

Finally returning to the topic of classes, I myself have recently invested in a Linked In class which I found very useful indeed.  Thank you emarketeers!  I now have all my friends asking me to pop round and give them tips on personal SEO etc over a glass of wine.

Watch out for more articles discussing my thoughts on Linked In shortly…..