About 8,250 twitter posts ago I made the conscious decision to begin to tweet to the world. At the time I didn’t know why, nor did I know what to say. All I knew was I’m now part of a gigantic social experiment. Now, five years later, I have to say its amazing. I have gotten used to communicating with strangers at odd hours, and honed my topics and tone. I have met those now-not strangers in person, went on photo walks and gone to many new events. This is a sphere of influencers, within and outside of my industry, I would have never met any other way.
But here’s my caveat: I’m in the business of social media. It’s a service offering of our business. As such I’m on social networks all the time, and with Twitter, in order to be successful, you need to be willing to spend the time to interact. Twitter is not a passive marketing tool, it needs to be tended to daily and have an owner who is willing to spend the time with it. For many of my clients, they just can’t commit the time or the energy. Many of them are business professionals, bakers, chefs, brewers and printers. Their primary order of business is to stick to their business—many just wouldn’t be able to keep up with posting. To this segment I say: Stop it, you don’t need this. Build your social capital where you are able to appear as authentic and real as you are in person.
But let’s look at the tale of two chefs.
First chef: You are extremely devoted to your restaurant but you decide you don’t have the time to connect and engage on twitter, and that’s fine- you’re one of many people who can’t. If you can’t tend the garden, then why plant it?
Or you’re the second chef. You are the local chef who is into the farm-to-table approach. You follow and are followed by, all the people right in your neighborhood. You may also follow the connected farmers who bring you the food and then, slowly, you expand your list to your fellow chefs who also love farm-to-table. Next thing you know, a food blogger starts to follow you and ask questions. That becomes an article that gets picked up by a national newspaper and all of a sudden you are destination location for a national foodie program. You could have said, “its not for me”, but you made twitter’s community your own and look where it got you.
Why do I write about these two different types? Because the platform must work for the business in order to ‘get it’. It’s not a wrong or right but it is a choice. We choose to jump into this platform and be open to all that it brings. The right thing is the right thing for you!
