.. is stop talking about Twitter.

“Follow us on twitter,” is quickly becoming the most overused phrase in mainstream media.

Those new to the party (I’m looking at you, CBC‘s Scott Oake) are over enthusiastic about it’s importance in the role of the population. The first question to Vancouver Canucks GMMike Gillis on HNIC‘s After Hours was about “the last tweet you wrote.” Gillis couldn’t remember. Gillis didn’t care. Neither did the audience.

If we were following him on Twitter, we knew the last tweet because we read it. If we’re not following him on Twitter, we don’t find him interesting enough to follow, or don’t understand Twitter enough to engage in the conversation.

The question was inside baseball and over the head of the audience.

Much of mainstream media caught up in the new social media world are overusing the content they mine from the site. They have yet to realize that Twitter is the back channel, not the main stage. It’s where everyone goes to chat and engage, and communicate, but when it starts to dominate the conversation in the foreground it becomes too much.

Twitter is still out of the reach of much of the mainstream. They know the word, they’ve heard about it, but they’re not active in the site. While there are 200M users on Twitter, most of the accounts are opened and never used. Twitter is the playground of the youth, the hipsters and the influencers – not the mainstream.

Engaging on the site is a valuable tool to create openness and engagement with your brand. Twitter is just something you do, it’s not something you need to keep talking about.

Tags: media, social media, sports, twitter