It’s getting warmer and warmer in London these days. I can’t help to wonder if Spring is here already. Saying this though, I know it snowed in April a couple years ago, so I’m fully aware that the English weather can be fooling us, just when we begin to feel the presence of Spring on our toes. So let’s not get too excited.
The same sentiment is occurring in the Japanese Social Media world. Everyone is very excited about recent changes. We’ve started to see some differences in the movement between the Western side of the Social Media world and the Japanese Social Media world. We’ll be digging these up in the future. So for now, let’s get the basics right.
In the last post I discussed about blogs as a Social Media platform and how to measure them. In this post let’s look at Twitter using the 5 measurements from my last post. I think this will be very helpful as a summary of the major platforms for those who are just starting up with their Japanese Social Media marketing and also those who want to reinforce their knowledge.
Twitter — 5 measurements applied
Twitter is a real time, highly spreadable Social Media platform utilising ‘interest graph’. Users have a passive attitude towards collecting information via the people they follow. Twitter can be said to be the most popular flowing type medium. Information on Twitter flows quickly. Also despite its openness, Twitter isn’t a strong tool for SEO.
Via the RT button, a maximum of 140 characters text spreads across the web. The 140 letter policy is applied in the same way for the Japanese language. However it actually allows for a lot more characters than we can write in English as our multi-bit character is also counted as one letter, also Kanji letters can be used to shorten words. Some utilise this advantage and write very informative tweets. But some prefer to use Hiragana which is a simpler alphabet in order to create ‘simple and casual’ tweets to express themselves and their current situations.
Twitter is known for its loose connection with other uses/followers. Even though we have block function, usually users are not so fussed about who and who not to follow. Twitter’s highly spreadable nature is based on this loose connection among users via the ‘interest graph’. Anything that has strong impression or something people can relate to can spread rapidly via the RT button. Connections on Twitter don’t require any confirmation from the followed user. This is a characteristic different from Mixi or Facebook.
Vol.3 for Facebook and Mixi will be coming shortly.
Thanks,
Kana & The Japan Buzz Team
