If A Tweet Falls In The Forest, Does It Make A Sound?

Recently, there’s been a push to force our entire editorial staff to use Twitter.  It makes some sense, because Twitter is one of our fastest growing sources of traffic along with Facebook.  But are all tweets equal?  Is simply having more better?

Probably not.  A person who tweets without any followers drives no traffic — the same is true for the friendless on Facebook.  It’s wasted effort unless the person is truly engaged.  So, how do you influence THAT?

Easy — incentives.  We want social media to continue to drive traffic growth.  We can measure traffic growth.  Creating a monetary incentive based on traffic growth will promote this behavior much more effectively than ‘forcing’ it.  Our team will want to keep things growing, because they’ll want to earn more money.  And if it’s based on growth, then we can afford it because it’s self-regulating.  There’s no worry of it bankrupting us, because the bonus pool is only available when things improve.

But, you say, shouldn’t everybody be altruistically engaged already?  Well, sure, but the best way to drive employee engagement is by showing them that they are appreciated.  Greed, in this case, is good.