Democratizing Conversation Data
Social conversation curation is hot again as everyone is working to figure out how they can take the conversations happening on their individual platforms and leverage them further. Every day, we’re all putting content out there, and most of that content is limited to our individual social connections and limited further by those that are online. That’s a lot of content being limited by the audience of a single individual.
Social platforms are doing something about it. It started with Twitter launching its Moments platform, which curates tweets related to a specific event within a single feed. Users can then add those tweets to their own personal Timelines and follow along. Facebook’s taken a different approach by updating its search offering to better display public conversations related to what people are searching for. Who can forget Instagram? Instagram launched a video channel for Halloween that curates video content that’s being shared on the platform. There’s potential for Instagram to continue to roll out other channels related to specific topics and content being shared on the platform.
Democratizing Data
We should be embracing all of these moves. These platforms are taking the data we’re putting out there, and making it useful for the rest of us. Curating content allows us to see what others are saying and find entertainment and/or education in it.
But it benefits the platforms, too. It makes them stickier. The constant influx of content means users have more reasons to stay on the platforms and use them as a go-to source when wanting to consume content related to a conversation. It also encourages people to create more content because they see what others are doing, feel the need to respond and share more. That means more data for the platforms, stickier content for users and a cycle all started by content curation.
Who Will Win?
This is a trend everyone is working to innovate in and develop, similar to video, but now the question is who will win.
Twitter has the best shot. After all, it’s taken what people already do on the platform and developed a product around that behavior. People broadcast publicly to Twitter all of the time. Moments just leverages that. Twitter’s challenge is its volume of users compared to the other players.
Facebook has user numbers. It indexes millions upon millions of conversations all the time, but a lot of that data is restricted by privacy settings. So just because someone is talking about a particular topic doesn’t mean it will or even can show up in search. Facebook may have the data, but it might not be able to use it in this way.
Instagram needs to figure out what it wants video channels to be. Halloween was an experiment. The team at Instagram knew people would be sharing their Halloween videos. It just curated it. Maybe Instagram is the place to curate fun images everyone can enjoy, not necessarily the hard hitting news content found on Twitter.
Good News for Brands
The winner doesn’t matter as long as brands come out ahead, and they will. Curating all of these conversations and surfacing them gives brands a chance at more exposure. When people talk about brands that content can have limited reach, but content curation gives that content more potential reach. The likelihood a brand will be the focus of a search on Facebook or Twitter Moment is low (unless something went horribly wrong), but marketers who authentically make their brands part of something people are already talking about has potential.