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It started with a tweet.
And five minutes into the first televised leaders’ debate I realised that the real political gems were not coming from Brown, Cameron or Clegg, but the Twitterati.
Overall Twitter activity during the debate was huge. Indeed, at its highest point #leadersdebate accounted for 5.5% of its global activity with 2475 Tweets a minute referring to the debate.
The next day, a fellow Tweeter and Marketecture client confirmed my suspicions. Nobody was playing the blindest bit of attention to what was on the telly. The online word was king.
And Facebook soon caught up. There was an online revolution of posts, groups and fan pages. People who couldn’t have picked the Lib Dem leader out of a crowd of women the week before were suddenly announcing that they agreed with Nick. Never before has one Liberal Democrat gone from hero to zero quite so quickly.
All of a sudden it seemed everyone was talking about social media as the weapon of choice in the politician’s armoury. And of course, here in the b2b world, social media was also on everyone’s lips. If Twitter could make a Kingmaker out of a ‘Nick who?’ just what could it do for b2b brands?
But before we get overly excited, let’s not forget that overall, despite the hype, the Lib Dem vote decreased. Just because people are talking about you, doesn’t mean they are ready to buy into your brand. Social media is a great tool to help you monitor your brand, engage with stakeholders and drive traffic to your website – it just won’t make you PM. Not yet.
That said, with a recent Cone Inc, social media in business study confirming that 93% of business buyers believe all companies should have a presence in social media, it’s influence is not to be sniffed at.
