By Israel Babalola
It is not an overstatement that media in Nigeria is currently mourning the ban placed on Twitter, a microblogging site that enables people to send and receive precise messages (tweets) and also elevated many Nigerians out of poverty.
It is such an unruly heavy impact for many media houses and media practitioners who partially make Twitter their second office to earning a living. The National Broadcasting Commission’s decision to have directed all Radio, TV, others to deactivate their account is nothing but a “pseudo”.
According to them, the suspension of Twitter operations in Nigeria by the Federal Government was because of the persistent use of the platform for activities that can undermine the corporate existence of Nigeria.
Twitter is one of the most used social media platforms particularly by social media managers/influencers. Its place amidst other platforms cannot be relegated even if the Nigerian government succeeds on its long-term suspension, it will continue to be a hard and pitiable incident over many in the media space of the country.
The ban means that all media houses/practitioners who efficiently use the twitter platform to boost and enhance their work have no choice than to look for alternatives.
Twitter can be a very helpful platform for creating and growing your brand as a media outlet or practitioner. The magic in Twitter for easy trends makes advertisement effective. Like any social media platforms, twitter’s primary focus is on precise and attractive content of your targeted community.
In media, Twitter is mostly used to alert audience and swiftly spread breaking news or create a trend / link that pulls audience to your media house. Information travels even faster than traditional media outlets by its ability to spread breaking news in a jiffy.
Media is all about pulling and engaging the audience. In the media industry, Twitter is one of the guaranteed social media platforms that helps in building and generating audience to their personal platform.
Beat 97.9 FM, Ibadan, with over 140,000 followers on the space will understand the negative impact of the inability to let the bird fly by Federal Government of Nigeria. Obviously, the radio station may lose their audience, thus, engagement between the consumer and producer ends.
We can identify Twitter as the marketing point of media industry, affordable tool for On-Air-Personalities, bloggers, online presence manager, advertisers, online publishers, among others. It’s prime time we made the bird fly in media if we want productivity and not dormancy in the industry. Arise for the peace of the industry!