One of my daily activities that constantly provides me with insights into life is Twitter. In addition to meeting great people and finding useful information, Twitter has taught me a great deal about how to be successful in life’s many ventures. The lessons Twitter has taught me are simple, but the implications are profound.
What Twitter has helped me learn is this:
Provide Unique Value
Provide unique value? It sounds too simple to be the secret to universal success, but hear me out.
When I was starting out on Twitter, like most people I wanted thousands of followers and to be seen as an authority in my field. What I quickly realized was no one was going to listen to me if I didn’t make it worth their while. Yes you can amass followers with a multitude of cheap tricks, but there are no shortcuts to becoming a truly influential person.
To attain the heights of influence and success, people have to care about 
you, but in order for people to care about you, you must provide them with something valuable. Only something of value will make people take the time to read your Tweets, engage you in conversation, share your content, and propel you into realms of fantastic success. It sounds almost paradoxical, but the only way to gain anything, online or offline, is to give something valuable away.
Of course, finding out how to create something of value is quite difficult, and finding a way to effectively distribute that value harder still. I’ve found the best way to learn how to effectively create value is to find someone already doing it, and fine-tune their strategies to make your own.
Someone who taught me a great deal about creating value was @Tweetsmarter. @Tweetsmarter attained massive influence through helping other Tweeps to harness the power of Twitter. @Tweetsmarter’s success has spawned many imitators, but none that rank as highly in Twitter prowess. This takes me to the second part of my statement, the part about uniqueness.
Unless you want to relegate yourself to playing second fiddle, you need to find a unique form of influence. @Tweetsmarter carved out a unique niche helping people understand the complexities of Twitter at a time when there were few people doing such a thing, and you can harness the same strategy to become influential. Find something not being properly addressed, be it a common problem or a frequent topic of discussion, and do your best to provide valuable assistance on the subject. If you are giving people the services they want, or the answers they are looking for, influence and success inevitably follow.
So take some time after this post to ponder what it is that you can do to provide unique value to your fellow tweeps/human beings. There are countless ways to carve out a unique niche of success and influence in the world, all it takes is an enterprising mind eager to locate and create new forms of value. Look around at the people you admire, and try to see how you can put a unique spin on the best things they do. Find what works and then make your own unique form of value.
If you have any thoughts on other ways to obtain online influence, or have some thoughts on the nature of creating value, I’d love to hear them. Send me a Tweet or leave a comment. I look forward to the responses.
Mr. David Benson is a social media analyst and coffeephile. He currently lives in New York City and works as an analyst for Mashwork, a social media analytics company. 
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26. March 2012 at 9:25 pm
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22. March 2012 at 12:18 pm
I really like this David.
But where does the line get drawn between providing unique content and providing what people want or need. For example I write scripts for Newsy.com and we have to pitch stories that are trending. If no one else it talking about it, then we don’t talk about either.
As a journalist the concept for this biz is disheartening…but when you see the results that come back from doing work this way it kind of makes sense. I guess what I’m getting at is: maybe there isn’t as much room for originality and new thoughts in an SEO driven world. Also, how does a person reach out to find audiences that appreciate their “unique” work if that work doesn’t come up in a random web search?
: /
22. March 2012 at 12:43 pm
Thanks for the insightful comment Leah,
You bring up some very good points and some complex issues.
I would make a counter-argument to your thoughts on an SEO driven web. By definition, the more people talking about the same thing creates an increasingly crowded field on which to compete. By providing unique content, or at least a unique viewpoint to a important event, a writer stands to gain more readership and a larger portion of the search engines for smaller, but less competitive, key word terms.
I totally understand how your thoughts relate to the journalism world, and you are very right that that industry is not positioned well in terms of search engine competition. News was conceived at a point in time where modern search was not an issue, and changing a centuries-held business model is hard. I still think that there is much to be gained in the journalism world by tackling competitive topics from a unique angle, and a less competitive slant. After all, Long-tail key wording sounds awesome, so it has to be something worth trying, right? 😉
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