Small Businesses Get Another Social Media Setback

You have your Twitter account.  You're using Tweetdeck or something like it to auto-post your tweets to Facebook, LinkedIn, and so on.  You can promote yourself and your business as far and wide as your ambition can go.

Then you see this in the news:

From Social Media Today:

Will New Twitter Filter Hurt Small Businesses?

"...Twitter’s streaming API will be able to rank which tweets are most important and how high they will be placed in the feed for developers. Though Roomann-Kurrik doesn’t explain how each tweet will be judged and ranked, big businesses with a large following and a high frequency of engagement will probably take over these top spots. For a company that founded itself on the notion that anyone should be able to share short, intimate, important thoughts or anecdotes, this change could leave some Twitter users feeling worthless, especially small businesses.

The new filter integration undermines the possibility to market to an endless pool of consumers, which was an action Twitter originally promoted. There’s no doubt that Twitter wants to make money, and understandably so, but this is going to hurt a lot of small businesses and possibly discourage individual users from using the site."

I intend to keep a very close eye on these developments for all of my clients who benefit from Twitter as an up-to-the-minute news and PR distribution outlet.

Like I said in an earlier post, if you're going to engage in social media for your PR efforts, be ready to change on short notice.  That includes being ready to abandon ship if a previously useful outlet becomes unprofitable.