Further to my post last week calling for newsagents to join the Twitter Army, I have been asked why this is important. Here’s my explanation…
Twitter is like a street corner from decades ago where someone on a soapbox could speak about anything and get some sort of audience. It is a place for you to have your say. It is also a place where you can get a message directly to someone. Along the way, anyone on Twitter can see what you say. You can also respond to the tweets of others – I’ve responded a few times to @RupertMurdoch.
You can see my tweets here.
I think that Twitter offers Australian newsagents an excellent opportunity to get attention on issues important to us as a channel. Hence my call for newsagents to sign up to Twitter and to email me at mark@towersystems.com.au their details.
I plan to occasionally email all newsagents with a Twitter account with a suggestion to tweet on a topic using a common hashtag. A hashtag is a way of connecting tweets from multiple people. Whether people actually tweet is up to them.
Each tweet is seen by those who follow you. It also comes up when people search tweets of just read recent tweets.
Your followers will be people who are interested in what you have to say. Most of your followers will be people you have never met. If they like a tweet they may re-tweet this to their followers. See the snowball effect.
Think about the Bill Shorten whack against newsagents a couple of weeks ago. A hundred or more newsagents tweeting about this could have got us on the top tweets at the time and this could have got the story on the radar of reporters and they could have confronted Shorten.
By organising ourselves in this way we create a digital megaphone for newsagents.
I think that newsagency businesses are relevant to Australia not only for the local and community service we provide but also for the our role in the Australian narrative. Our businesses are quintessentially Australian. We need to reflect this by talking more about ourselves and what we think as a channel.
If we have a strong enough collecting voice on Twitter we could possibly influence on issues on which we might otherwise not be heard.