There’s a reason it’s a tweet, not a cheap
Posted By Justene Cowie, 29/09/2014 9:04:06 PM

I think I’ve discovered the biggest black hole of time yet. 

It isn’t your weekly team meeting, it isn’t attempting to circumnavigate Melbourne via Hoddle Street during peak hour and it isn’t waiting for the IT helpdesk to get back to you.  No, it’s the microblogging madness that knows no bounds … Twitter.

You see, I’ve recently taken up the mantle of driving Coral’s Twitter account.  Yes, we have one. Sure we’ve had the occasional burst of tweeting activity, thank you @_rebeccajackson, @wayneiac and @iabcvic for the retweets by the way.  But for the most part it hasn’t been used to its fullest potential, whatever that may be.

I have to fess up to not being a Twitter expert, either personally or professionally in previous roles, so I’ve been spending some time delving deep into the world of #internalcomms in order to be well schooled before the tweets start hatching from @CoralComms.  My main learning from this research over the past couple of days is that the quality and wealth of information just a hashtag away is amazing, but who on earth has time to read all this stuff!!

There’s gold on Twitter, without question. It’s a wonderful platform to seek out and share information, source valuable tools and articles that can help us perform our roles and keep us up to speed with what’s happening within our industry across the globe. But there’s also a lot of guff amongst the gold.

Did you know that there are approximately 1 billion tweets every 48 hours?  In the past couple of weeks alone there have been hundreds of tweets using the #internalcomms tag, let alone #comms or #engagement or other tags commonly used by our peers. Add to this all the tweets by those people, organisations or events you’re following.  It simply isn’t possible to consume all this information.

And chances are that you are primarily a consumer of tweets rather than a producer, as a recent study into the use of Twitter revealed that 80 per cent of users have tweeted fewer than 10 times and 40 per cent of users have never sent a single tweet.

Our time is precious, indeed time is money. So all this consumption of fascinating tweets begs the question - how can we ensure we’re getting the best value for the time we spend on Twitter?  Or if you want to be cute - how can we get a cheap tweet, in terms of the value of the information verses the time spent looking for it.

I actually don’t know the answer to this question yet, as I bravely admitted I’ve still got my Twitter training wheels on, and I expect there are quite a lot of other novices out there too. Perhaps some of the established social media experts can share their views.  But what I can share is some of the terrific tweets I’ve come across in my trip down the #internalcomms rabbit hole. 

Below are my picks for the best of what’s trending in the IC Twitter space:

Coral’s Top IC Tweets

(click on the tweet images to go to the original content)

Best resource:  

http://yourthoughtpartner.hs-sites.com/ceo-secret-weapon?utm_content=5525691&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter