A Rich Seam Of Content

I'm fascinated by all the goings on within the social media world at present, with brands vying for position and figuring out how other services sit alongside their own. Despite the size and legacy of both Facebook and LinkedIN, Twitter seems to be the one brand that others have given up trying to compete with and have opted for the partnership route.

Whilst status updates are clearly nothing new, Facebook clearly gained mass-market acceptance long before Twitter - and one could argue that actually the speed of Twitter's success, from niche amongst the social media and communications hardcore to the mainstream is down to the general public's use of Facebook's status updates alongside Facebok's other addictive functionality.

Along with Friends Reunited, which has been left standing by the success of other brands despite being the first social network used by most people, LinkedIN is another network which has been around a good deal longer than many of the household name brands - however it only added status updates relatively recently. I've recently spent a good deal of time and effort on ramping up my usage of LinkedIN but have only changed status updates once or twice - and then only when I intend to ask the community something - whereas with twitter, the content ranges from views on a rugby match to news that I've picked up and want to share with others.

Although I've used Twitter for amost two years, I'm certainly amongst those that used Facebook before Twitter and therefore know how much I used to change status update before jumping ship and moving to Twitter virtually wholesale. Moreover, whilst it's perhaps semantics, when updating Facebook, the content seemed to be distinctly personal whereas Twitter seems to be a far broader cross reference of my entire life, as a micro-blog.

What I think is most interesting about the recent deals with both Facebook and now LinkedIn is that it means that Twitter users effectively extend their audience of followers dramatically through the consolidation of networks, whilst only actually needing to use one (Twitter). I can now update Twitter via a client such as Tweetdeck from my phone, which update a) Twitter b) facebook c) friendfeed d) LinkedIN e) the Punch site and f) any other RSS feeds drawing this content, such as my personal blog. What this does is position Twitter as a seam of content that runs throughout the other networks and information outlets, cementing Twitter's position. Moreover, I actually don't have to interact with more than one network, without the vast majority of my personal communities necessarily knowing.

In the case of facebook for example, my input usage has droped off considerably in recent months since integrating Twitter but when I do update, I respond to the responses that I receive.

With the deals recently confirmed with both Google and Bing, I can't see a competing application ousting Twitter any time soon - but more importantly from a search marketing perspective, this suggests that Twitter really is going to be the horse for a brand to bet on in terms of long term effort as a communications vehicle.

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