How Radio Can Use Twitter to Connect with Its Audience

I wrote this article which appeared in The Sands Report, a weekly email for alternative rock radio professionals:

Using Twitter to Connect With Your Audience

Alan Burns & Associates recently conducted a study in which they found that most music radio stations don’t use their airtime to talk about the things that are on listeners’ minds.   Rather, “radio stations dominantly talk to their audiences about the radio station.”  The study went on to find:

The typical music radio station in the U.S. has 14 breaks an hour (think of it as 12 songs, 2 stopsets, and a transition into each as a “break”).  The results of our analysis indicate that:

• 10 of those will contain station positioning language, either live or recorded.
• 7 of them will contain contest, promotional, sales merchandising, website and/or text program information.
• ONE of them, on average, will contain something said/designed solely because a listener might be interested in it, having nothing to do with the station.

However, that’s an average. On 8 of the 20 stations we monitored, there were NO statements targeted solely to the listener’s interests or needs.

And on a typical music station, a song (or multiple songs) are identified 4 times an hour. Other than that, on average there are NO comments about music.

You can read more about the study here.

In short, radio is talking to its audience about things that the audience doesn’t care about.  When radio fails to engage listeners by talking about the things that are on their minds, it encourages them to turn to other outlets.

Once upon a time, air talent had to guess what people were going to be talking about around the water cooler each day.  Morning shows would stay up late to watch Leno and Letterman in case something interesting happened.  Jocks would subscribe to all the major magazines in search of topical content.  Google made this job somewhat easier; now jocks could look up content quicker, but they were still guessing whether or not they were researching the right content.

Enter Twitter. With its endless stream of tweets cataloguing the mundane tasks of total strangers (“I’m eating Wheaties for breakfast.”), it’s tempting to dismiss Twitter as just the latest fad in a long line of social media sites that stretch back to Friendster. But Twitter is fundamentally altering the way we communicate in a way that cannot be easily dismissed.

Most of us now use Google several times a day.  Web search engines revolutionized the world by allowing us to search through millions of online documents in an instant. The key word in that last sentence is “documents.”  Searching Google is like being able to walk into a library and search through every book and magazine article in the building instantly.  But all of these documents, like all webpages, have been thoughtfully prepared.  They are not spontaneous bits of communications.

Like Google, Twitter also has a search feature.  But when you search Twitter, you’re not searching through documents.  You’re searching through conversations.  Real-time, off-the-cuff conversations.  It’s as if each of us spoke in cartoon word bubbles that could be sorted and searched according to the words they contain.  As a result, we no longer need to guess at what people are talking about around the watercooler.  We know – because Twitter tells us.

Twitter itself will give you a list of “Trending Topics” on the right side of the page.  For a better visual representation, check out www.TwitScoop.com, which arranges hot topics into a tag cloud (in a tag cloud, the size of a word on the screen is proportional to number of times it is being used).  In some cases, it’s not surprising to see what is popular in Twitter conversations.  Last week, Kanye West and Jay Leno were trending high on Twitter.

Twitter takes much of the guesswork out of figuring out what content is most relevant to your audience.  As time goes on, programmers will build Twitter tools that allow you to break down hot topics by age, gender, location and other demographic factors.  Twitter is a fantastic tool for jocks (especially morning shows) and programmers alike.  Use it to make sure that you are talking to your audience about the same things that they are talking to each other about.  Use Twitter to reconnect with your audience.å

Seth Resler is the President of New England Social Media, a company that helps clients – include radio stations and air talent – manage their social media presence.  He is the former Program Director of 95.5 WBRU in Providence. Reach him at Seth@NewEnglandSocialMedia.com.