It's all about the content: Are brands overinvesting in Twitter?
I attended the "Real time! Search meets Social" event / panel last night hosted by SEMPO (as part of Social Media Week). It was a more enjoyable event than the super-crowded-bars-filled-with-media-girls events I attended earlier in the week (that's a personal bias: I hate crowded spaces where I have to shout to speak with the person right next to me).
One thought I had last night was, aren't brands overinvesting in Twitter? If you think about it, the most valuable tweets fall into two categories: breaking news and links to interesting content. And the former is only valuable right now — 2 week old breaking news isn't very "breaking" anymore. So the real value comes from giving people on Twitter content worth sharing: it's word-of-mouth and it's free! Furthermore, if you look at dollars spent as a result of search versus Twitter, search is larger by orders of magnitude, so shouldn't brands be focused on creating content (including blog posts) that gets indexed by search engines and passed around on Twitter / IM / email / Facebook?
I asked this question of the people on the panel, who represented StockTwits, HootSuite, Shorty Awards, Trendrr, and Collecta, a very Twitter focused bunch (other than Collecta). I didn't get a very clear answer from any of them, but generally it seemed like they agreed with me, which is ironic considering how Twitter-centric they are.
When brands get back to questions of ROI and metrics when investing time and resources into social media, I think we will see a resurgence in blogging and multimedia, because at the end of the day, people need "something" to tweet about and share. Better to be talked about, than simply talk.