Every Character Matters: Marketing in the Age of Twitter
Posted by Dave McCue on March 6th, 2009
Here’s a fun little experiment—open up a search engine, close your eyes, and peck out any combination of 3-4 random letters on your keyboard. More often than not, some company, event or association already using that combination of letters as an acronym will show up in your results. Some of my initial results were the Association of Synchronous Data Formats (ASDF), which must get a lot of traffic from bored people drumming their fingers on home row, and Gnu Privacy Guard (GPG), which is actually free software and not a security detail for wildebeests as I originally hoped.
The reason behind this acronym overload is that today’s audience has grown accustomed to a world in which everything is faster, smaller, and to-the-point. What used to be a giant stack of CD cases is now contained in an iPod that fits in your pocket. A phone call to see how a friend is doing has become a 5-second check of their status on social media sites like Facebook. Kentucky Fried Chicken has become KFC, because who has time for 6 syllables when 3 will do just fine?
As someone who enjoys reading and writing, I don’t always identify with this “quick fix” mindset so common to the online audience. But as an online marketer, I’ve seen the effectiveness of concise communications. Search engine results, AdWords, Twitter, article excerpts with “Read more” links–all of these things so important to the online experience share the same common element; relaying short bursts of information that users can either ignore, or choose to explore further.
When creating online marketing materials, this knowledge of the audience should always be top of mind. Does this mean your email newsletters should only contain 140 characters, which is the maximum allowed in a Twitter post? Of course not—but if recipients are being conditioned to give “140 characters” worth of their attention before moving onto something else, your window of opportunity as a marketer just got a lot shorter. The subject lines of your emails, article headlines on your web site, the first frame of copy on a rotating banner ad—the difference between engagement and squandered opportunity can be measured by a snap of the fingers.
Marketing in the face of a non-existent attention span is a tough battle to fight, but it can be won by crafting powerful, concise messaging at the front of your communications. You know that there is more to see—convince them.
With apologies to the European Christian Mission, I recommend adopting the following mantra for your online marketing efforts (complete with a ready-made acronym): Every Character Matters — ECM.
