Twitter

Can I be honest with you? Your Twitter page is boring. Oh, I know it’s not your fault. By design there is nothing overly exciting about anyone’s default Twitter page. Even the little about me square in the upper right hand corner of the page is boring and doesn’t really offer enough space to tell prospective followers anything about you. So, wouldn’t it be great if you could spice up your Twitter page and give people a reason to follow you before they even read a single one of your tweets? Well, now you can using bubbles.

Before I tell you all about how you can attract Twitter followers by adding personality to your Twitter page, I’d like to thank @Shama Hyder at Click to Client for introducing me to this great Twitter video tool.

Bubbles, or rather Bubble Tweets are circular shaped video clips for your Twitter page that automatically play for visitors the first time they visit. This plays on the idea of pattern interruption because it grabs the visitors attention and pulls them away from the “next next next” pattern of clicking between web pages.

It also adds something that has been missing from an otherwise great social networking tool, and that’s personality. With BubbleTweets you can give potential followers a little taste of who you are or what they can expect from you as a personality. You can be all business, or all humor, or all cutesy. Whatever you choose, you have 30 seconds to do it on camera.

Now, let’s be certain. This is a tool and just like every other tool out there it has great potential. It has the potential to help you connect with your Twitter page visitor and hopefully turn them into a follower, and it has the potential to annoy people. If it’s used creatively, I can see it being a great tool that will add a whole new layer to Twitter. But if it’s over used, which it will be, in a “me too” boring way then the novelty will wear off and it will become annoying. Like I said, it has the potential to attract and to annoy.

So, ask yourself, “What will I say and how will I say it”. Will your 30 seconds be all about you or all about your Twitter page visitor? Will you speak to a virtual crowd of people or will you address one person sitting at one keyboard in front of one screen? Will you give the visitor a reason to follow you that seeks to add value to their daily noise? These are all valid questions and you should spend some time thinking about how to get the most value from such an engaging tool like video on Twitter.

The big question in my mind is, will Bubble Tweets increase your Twitter follows? I’ll be interested to see some real world test results. Will a call to action style video do better than a silly video? Will a direct address or a cross promote message do better? Will a tip of the day message do better than a “hi my name is” message? Personally I think it will have the ability to increase Twitter follows 10 fold if used creatively.

Will Twitter or other third party developers start offering more things like this in the future? Oh, I definitely think so. BubbleTweets is one of those ideas that kicks the door to other previously unrealized ideas. Maybe we’ll have the opportunity to add all type of bubble widgets to our page, or maybe we’ll get to add personality bubbles down the left side of the page that target specific types of information. Maybe we’ll be able to deliver polls or one time offers, or act now (operators are standing by) offers…okay hopefully it will be smoother than that, but you get the idea. Don’t think this is going to be limited to a 30 second video bubble of you in a half lit room recording a nose cam shot to say hi to your visitors.

You can bet, it has much more potential than that.

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com