I thought I would start off the week with what for some will be a controversial topic.

As twitter has grown in popularity the ways that businesses and brands use the service has naturally evolved.

While twitter is widely considered a tremendous tool for one to one engagement, relationship building and networking, it is also showing interesting opportunities for broadcast tactics. I know that the very mention of this conjures up talk of spam, but I don’t mean broadcasting the “hi, click here, no value added” method. Some might disagree with this use, but I am seeing evidence of organizations successfully using twitter to promote and broadcast content, events, campaigns and launches in ways that followers find valuable.

There certainly are ways to do this poorly and simply add noise, but there are ways to do it well and add value. Guy Kawasaki may be one of the more famous twitter broadcasters pumping out tweets all day that point to interesting and useful content around the web. Some folks suggest this is a vulgar use of the tool while last count showed that over 125,000 followers seem to think it’s a valuable use.

The broadcast model also presents an interesting question for me. In my own little unscientific way, I’ve noticed that most responses and retweets to my content happen immediately. The way that people read or interact with twitter is a bit like a flowing river – people address the content that floats by at the moment they happen to be reading. Now, I know that some people follow small groups of people and may read their tweet stream more like a magazine, but for the most part, people check in and read what’s going on right now.

So, what this might suggest is that maximizing exposure for content requires reposting your tweets several times a day in an effort to catch the morning drive time, lunch surfers, and evening after the kids are in bed tweeters, very much like a radio or TV broadcast buy might include different dayparts. One might suggest that followers would grow weary of repeating content, but I don’t think many of same followers would actually encounter the repetition due to the way that content on twitter is consumed by the masses.

Purists might object to this notion, but it’s certainly food for thought and exploration.

Image credit: Steve Beger Photography

Related articles by Zemanta

• Guy Kawasaki says Twitter is Marketing Weapon in SES Webcast (searchenginewatch.com)
• Guy Kawasaki Can Handle Being Called a Spammer (blogs.wsj.com)