Twitter is not a Social Strategy for Business

Want to build a social networking strategy with your customers and partners?

Here's one piece of advice: Twitter is not going to help you. Facebook, yes. Twitter, no.

This point was brought home to me reading an interview with Harvard Business School professor Mikolaj Piskorski, who is doing research on how people use social sites. Listen to what he told Cable360.net, and the difference between developing a digital strategy and a social strategy. The best social strategy, he says, is one that helps your customers connect with other customers:

"With Twitter, a company can talk to customers or potentials, and it is two-way communication. This is a great example of a digital strategy that you use as a cheap platform to communicate with your audience. It is a fantastic idea, particularly because it's free!..."

"This is not social strategy yet, because it does not allow two people in the audience to be better friends or to meet new friends. It does not allow people to improve their friendships in the same way that Facebook does. And so it does not build the same level of engagement. Note that you can have just a digital strategy, and that's perfectly fine. But you will be missing out on huge opportunities to connect customers to each other. This is where you can really generate huge engagement."