Learning What and When to Tweet

Can Twitter ever rival Facebook in importance?
We think that could be the case. A lot of our clients have been publishers. They have massive amounts of content that they can constantly post to Twitter. Publishers are finding the amount of traffic can be overwhelming. Facebook is clearly a larger platform and more evolved with monetization. Anytime there’s a platform with hundreds of millions of people talking, it creates opportunities. Facebook is more evolved as far as this is concerned. Because Twitter is more in infancy stage, it provides brands the opportunity to take a leadership position. It’s more early stage. It’s an interesting time to see what you can do now.

How do you see the social media marketing world evolving? Similarities with search?
Social is evolving a lot like search. It’s one of the things that attracted me to Socialflow. There’s a lack of integration. Anytime new channel emerges, marketers tend to treat it separately. Search was managed separately for years. There’s also confused metrics. Most companies embraced search because they heard it was effective. But they weren’t doing much to measure it well. The advertisers were measuring clicks but not what was happening on the website. Companies are now paying for likes. A marketer’s goal in social shouldn’t be disconnected from broader marketing efforts. There’s also tons of data collected in search process. There’s tons of other potential aspects for it. The same can be true for social. It can be used to inform marketing efforts in other channels and help with product development. There is a critical need of blending automated systems and human expertise. People will always be a critical part of any marketing effort. The idea is to give consideration of what parts can be automated and insert people back to the process. We know an algorithm is better at posting your message to Twitter. But when people start talking back to you, you need people responding.

You spent a couple years as an angel investor and startup advisor. What’s your take on the bubble question?
It’s hard to say if there’s a bubble having been through the previous one at a company that went public in 2000. It feels different to me. Valuations have gone up. The cost of starting a company has never been lower. It’s good that people with an idea have an easier time of seeing if it succeeds or fails. I’ve definitely seen a lot of companies where I’ve wondered if they need to exist. But if they don’t, they’re going to fail because they can’t raise a follow-on round. Worst case scenario, these companies fail and a lot of talent will be out in the marketplace.