Express Lane: 140 or less

In its core, Twitter is just another social networking site. It’s mostly full of snapchat dog filter photos and more spam accounts than you could ever even imagine. Yet it has become more powerful than we could have ever imagined and all with only 140 characters or less which is strangely #impressive. Twitter can expose injustice, incite and document riots and of course sell hamburgers.

The internet is an overloaded tsunami of information that are all competing for your customer’s attention span. Suddenly your online presence is a course for concern, you have to utilize every social avenue in its correct form. Twitter is a great way to communicate with your customer base directly with tweets and retweets. The 140 or less character count causes your thoughts to have to be extremely concise and ends up with some very interesting tweets. Several tweets have been testing the waters on what interacting on twitter really means. Like any other marketing social media marketing means you have to appeal to your target audience and given that twitter is generally millennials most companies try to appeal to them. But given that the team behind the literal twitter handle are speaking for an entire company or corporation how much freedom you have when tweeting.

Like Wendy’s for example has a very interesting approach to social media and has been ‘roasting’ people absolutely ‘savagely’. The international fast food chain set out to make waves and get noticed online, almost nobody would have noticed if they just tweeted pictures of hamburgers with #freshneverfrozen. The team running the page seem to tweet at their leisure always with Wendy’s promotion as their main goal but the way they get there is very interesting. But what the most interesting is their responses to the tweets they get. It’s become an interesting twitter trend to tweet at @Wendy’s and ask them what to get at Burger King or McDonalds and they always have very interesting responses which is usually a witty response or a picture of trash can to symbolize a McDonalds. At first it seems very unprofessional and very risky yet it’s working. Wendy’s has gained legendary twitter status in a short time, just from these savage roastings.

However, Twitter can of course be utilized to do much more important things then sell hamburgers though. Twitter has been used by people to document important events all over the world giving us unfiltered unedited chunks of what is really happening in the world. When tragedy struck Boston during the Boston Bombing Twitter was the first to know about and got exclusive coverage until major news outlets covered. Within minutes of it happening people knew what had happened and family members knew who was safe. When Syria was under attack, its citizens used twitter to show us the realness of the tragedies that were happening. It was graphic and it was raw but it was real nothing was sugarcoated.

With Twitter being seemingly ubiquitous it’s one of the best ways to communicate with the masses. When incidents like the United Airlines incident footage of the attack was all over the internet. Twitter was used to directly spread information and footage of what happened and it had a direct influence on UA. Their stock immediately dropped an insane amount, before the days of the internet this incident would have never take off the way it did and would have most likely been swept right under the rug.

When 45 for some reason decided to respond to Syria’s chemical attacks with a hellfire of bombs which would kill innocent civilians it made rounds all over twitter. It’s impossible to not see 45 trending on twitter because that’s his favorite place to be. There was a direct feed of Americans mostly disagreeing with the attack but a few in support of, but also contact with people all over the world and how they responded to violence. It’s always helpful to get the opinion of the people outside of American viewpoint to see how vastly different we work as a country. Most importantly we got the viewpoint of Syrians and we got to hear and see that our actions have consequences, we could see the real human cost of our actions.

Contrastingly when Gov. Cuomo and Sen. Sanders passed their NYS free college bill we all got the inside scoop from twitter. People all over the web celebrated this victory for New York Students online. Yet while the bill is a great win there were some flaws and holes poked in it on twitter. In a day and age where it so easy to simply block people we don’t agree with, we really must make an attempt not to because we are really starting to devalue contrasting opinions, and that’s quite a misstep.

I chose to follow a diverse palate of ‘tweeters’ and chose Sen. Bernie Sanders, Arby’s and angry Bill O’Reilly prodigy Tomi Lahren. I chose sanders because during the primary election he was the one I believed in and social media was the way his political revolution spread. When major news outlets only focused on corporate shrills Trump and Hillary the bare minimum was shined on Senator Sanders so his momentum was made online and most of it was done by his voters and supporters. Whether it was groups being set up or fundraising events you were getting invites too it was all done online.

I followed Arby’s because they are doing a tremendous job with their social media marketing and have found tremendous success from it. As someone who someday hopes to run a social media campaign I found their bold attempt to appeal to a very specific audience as absolutely genius. Lastly, I followed Lahren as her political opinions and her show of blonde yelling never ceases to anger me. She’s controversial and she makes people mad and she knows that and she owns it.   

Twitter is a very unique experience because it is so limited and causes you to have to be so concise and precise at all times. It completely limits your writing style and really causes you to have to think outside the box. Writing a tweet that is informative and interesting at the same time is a surprisingly big feat to accomplish. I have a much bigger appreciation for the people who get paid to tweet all day long, it’s tough out there.