Brand managers are increasingly seeing being among the top of conversation trends on Twitter as a measure of success.
Live television, too, is often leveraged on trends to estimate success.
But how useful is this strategy, really? And does trending on Twitter really accurately measure any form of success?
At a recent business function on women’s representation in boardrooms, organizers repeatedly asked the audience to tweet using the event’s hashtag.
As the audience complied with the call, attention was drawn from the speakers to phones, tablets and laptops.
Let us trend, seemed the new goal of the conference.
One could only imagine what was going through the poor speaker’s mind as he lost attention and eye contact to this business of trending. This function was by no means the first nor the last to call on audiences to keep the hashtag going.
Brand managers are increasingly seeing being among the top of conversation trends on Twitter as a measure of success.
Live television, too, is often leveraged on trends to estimate success.
But how useful is this strategy, really? And does trending on Twitter really accurately measure any form of success?
To some extent, there is an advantage to trending. It draws in remote audiences who may otherwise not be able to weigh in on conversations.
“I may not be at a conference, but will follow the hastag to get what is being deliberated on,” says digital news thought leader, Mr Nic Newman.
But beyond this, what value does trending, on Twitter specifically, contribute to a business?
Social media research firm Nendo has studied Kenya’s social media habits and draws interesting patterns on online behaviour.
In their A to Z of Kenyan Twitter, the firm has described some main buzz words that have captured the imagination of most Kenyans.
What is interesting to note here is that most trends are pushed by pseudo accounts that do not quite describe organic trends.
Nendo founder and chief executive, Mark Kaigwa describes this as “Vanity Metrics”.
Nendo’s numbers also reveal that Kenya on Twitter is not as diverse or large a community as all the hype over trending and hashtags might imply. The firm estimates that there are one million active Kenyan users on Twitter.
Active
It is to this narrow community that brands are pandering to when they insist that their products, events must trend.
While this community may be a niche market and audience for many companies, they should never delude themselves that their trending hashtags have more of a reach and impact than they actually do.
“Trending is not a measure of viewership,” says media personality Larry Madowo. His Twitter account has over a million followers or the equivalent of all active Kenyans on Twitter, going by Nendo’s statistics.
“There is no point in having your hashtag trend if you are not reaching the right audience,” adds Mr Newman.
It should not be lost that even though trending is not quite a measure of business success, companies regularly milk online platforms to enhance customer loyalty.
Most corporates actively using these platforms say they address thousands of client queries through social media sites.
But as businesses occupy themselves with becoming popular on Twitter, there are other streets on the Internet that are barely explored.
Communications Authority of Kenya statistics show that the country has over 40.5 million Internet users. The rise in Internet usage in recent years has been fuelled by availability of cheap smartphones and falling data prices.
These government statistics on Internet usage imply that Kenya is barely scratching the surface on social media. Getting topics to trend cannot be the only way of audience engagement.
In the 2017 International Journalism Festival held in Perugia, Italy – Facebook and Google announced plans to slowly and steadily advance steps towards the use of video platforms as audience engagement was relatively higher than in generic posts.
It is a strategy that did not miss the eye of professional networking site, LinkedIn, which is beginning to unravel Africa’s best kept secret.
It is estimated that the platform is registering a 35 per cent average growth in Africa (year on year). LinkedIn launched a video upload platform barely a month ago, as the battle for audience numbers and time-spend per page (engagement) continues.
LinkedIn Video launch mirrors a prediction made for 2017 by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalsim saying, “Big year for audio/podcasts as Facebook rolls out social and live audio formats”
Rethinking
Still on the Prediction notes, the social media scene has placed journalism on the spotlight. Harvard’s journalism research hub, the Nieman Lab, says “2017 means rethinking every aspect of our designs, what they say, what they assume and how they might better serve our audience,” says Melody Kramer, audience development manager at Wikimedia Foundation.
Corporates too are not left out in this jostle for market share.
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