5 Reasons Every Thought Leader Should Be on Twitter Right Now
So You Want to Be a Thought Leader, Eh?
You believe you’ve got something to say. Sure you do. And logically, everyone wants to hear it. So you want to become an industry thought leader. It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in. Everyone’s doing it.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with being a thought leader. It’s not always driven by ego or self-promotion. Oftentimes you do have essential knowledge about your product or service that’s truly worth sharing with an interested community. So go ahead and take the step. But there’s one thing you’re going to need first — a Twitter account.
Faster is Better
In today’s modern digital age where instant gratification is a way of life, if you plan to make ground breaking waves in your industry, change the way the world thinks about your product segment, or you simply want to personally brand yourself, you need be on Twitter. If not merely to serve as a distribution hub for your blog posts, your Twitter account is what’s going to make you relevant with your audience.
Five Reasons a Twitter Account is Essential to Being an Industry Thought Leader
1. Twitter is Where All the Real News Breaks First
There’s no place on the web where news is released faster than on Twitter. For all the black eyes the sometimes misunderstood and often maligned microblogging site gets, Twitter has literally revolutionized the way we get information. As an aspiring thought leader for your product, your service, your industry, your company, or for yourself, a Twitter account will be your lifeline to the rest of the world.
As we all know, some of the most important stories of recent time were broken in 140 characters or less. There was the death of Osama bin Laden at the hands of U.S. Navy Seals last Spring. Then of course there was this week’s Twitter-shaking report that Beyonce and Jay-Z were having a baby. Jimmy Fallon may have “broken” it best, on Twitter, naturally. Both stories sent the Twitterverse into a veritable tizzy. And if you plan to be a spokesman for your brand, your cause, or are seeking to position yourself as a resource, Twitter is your first best bet. You will, of course, need a blog, a Facebook page and other online resources as well. But you can start here.
2. You Have a Huge Audience That’s Ready to Listen
It’s been widely reported that Twitter has somewhere in the realm of 200 million registered users. This estimate varies depending on the source. But either way you shake it, it’s a whole bunch of people clamoring to listen to what you might have to tell them. According to Wikipedia, Twitter users send up to 155 million tweets a day (again, depending who you talk to). You might say that’s a hefty number of messages to compete with, but with approximately 40% of these tweets considered by a Pear Analytics survey to be ‘pointless babble’, your challenge becomes much less daunting. As an effective communicator offering valuable knowledge and insight, you should easily be able to break through the clutter while also having a built-in distribution hub.
3. Twitter is One of the Web’s Most Popular Sites
Alexa, the California-based web traffic reporting company and subsidiary of retail giant Amazon, ranks Twitter as one the Top Ten most visited sites in the world. If none of our other arguments convince you to get involved on the platform, that should.
A true thought leader needs to be where the action is, and Twitter is truly one of the “in” places. Estimates are that the site’s success is only going to increase over time. And considering they’ve not yet come up with a plan to make money but still remain a viable and hugely successful business, the likelihood of the site going away anytime soon is very small. Any thought leader considering it should get on board now, if not only to ensure you can still claim ownership of your own name, or some close semblance of it.
4. Journalists Are There Looking for You
The people who actually report the news are using Twitter to find the news. More and more, journalists are looking to Twitter to get ideas for stories, locate contacts to quote, identify current events to cover, products to review and conduct research on all the above. And Twitter knows this. The company recently released a user’s guide just for journalists entitled “Twitter for Newsrooms” that helps editors and reporters find their way around. The fact that you’re a thought leader for your industry and you need to reach out to reporters who are actually searching for you should tell you that you need to be on Twitter today.
5. Your Competition is Already Taking Over
While Twitter may be new to you, it’s not new to others in your industry. If you want to take control of the message and influence consumer perception of your industry or your brand, you’d better have a good handle on what your competition is up to. And you can find out on Twitter. Or, if you prefer, you can slog through endless pages of online industry publications to find out what the movers and shakers in your field are up to. However, it’s likely the news you find is going to be more “history” than “breaking,” as it takes 1000 times longer to write a 1400-word article than it does a 140-character tweet. And once your competition is out in front, you’ve got a long way to go to catch up.
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Thanks much Tamra! Much appreciated.
Saved, I love your blog!