Many organizations and companies that redesign their website throw the electronic newsletter overboard. If you want to stay informed, you can only follow via Facebook or Twitter. It seems that organizations that make this decision do not realize what happens to their content. It disappears into the mass and they can only hope that someone stumbles upon it by chance. Time to revalue the rock-solid electronic newsletter.
Stay informed
It happened to me last week. I visited the website of an organization that had given itself a new look and thought I could subscribe to a newsletter . An afternoon and evening newsletter. A weekly newsletter. Who knows, a thematic weekly newsletter. Technically, the possibilities are endless. In practice, the possibilities turned out to be limited. No newsletter. Only the familiar icons of Facebook and Twitter with the caption: 'Stay informed, follow us on Facebook and Twitter.'
Follow us on Facebook and Twitter
Haven't seen you in a while
Now, the very last thing that happens when you follow organizations and companies on Facebook and Twitter is that you stay informed. On the contrary. This is what happens:
You start by liking X like you've already liked hundreds of things on Facebook. And you follow X on Twitter like you've already followed hundreds of things on Twitter. And because you like a little bit of order and want to keep things a little bit organized, you also add X to a certain Twitter list. A few weeks later you suddenly think: 'I started following X on Facebook and Twitter a few weeks ago. I haven't seen anything from him in my streams for a while. How is that going? Has X stopped?'
You go to X’s website and discover that X has been publishing some great content over the past few weeks. Not all of it is great, but there is some content that you would have read if you had seen it. There you have it: if you had seen it . So how come you didn’t see any of it? You remember seeing a few Facebook posts from X in the early days of following X, but you either didn’t have time or the title didn’t appeal to you enough to not click through. Apparently, Facebook’s algorithm interpreted this as ‘not interested’ and you haven’t seen anything from X since.
Real time
On to Twitter. Same problem there. There too, you haven't seen any ecuador mobile phone number list thing of what X tweeted in the past few weeks. For example, the organization tweeted interesting content at 11am and 3pm. But you only checked Twitter at 1:30pm and given the short lifespan of a tweet and the fact that none of those you follow retweeted it, that tweet didn't come into your field of vision either. Few people scroll back more than two hours in their Twitter feed, I think.
(It is not without reason that Twitter's trump card is 'real-time'. Perhaps useful for breaking news. But can you, as an organisation that produces sustainable content, do anything with it?) So much for 'following' X via Twitter.
Strategy
So you can speak of a tracking problem: it is not because we like and follow companies and organizations that we can really follow them. The way in which organizations and companies flock en masse like lemmings to Facebook and Twitter for their communication, makes it clear that people are somewhat insufficiently aware of this tracking problem.
Photo courtesy of Fotolia.
Photo courtesy of Fotolia.