How adding a context to your content on Twitter can help your brand grow?

It came as no surprise when research stated that Osama Bin Laden’s death filled social media sites more than an hour before the official word was out from the President of the U.S, Barack Obama. Now this is because the world has seen this happening before:  The tsunami and earthquake that hit Japan is one of the most recent world phenomenons I could use as an example.

The biggest and the most influential platform during these incidents has been Twitter, confirms Mashable’s Survey. For a marketer, the key is to understand your content and its context. If you have something valuable to offer to the masses and they can connect with it, your brand can go places with a simple retweet.

These incidents have changed the way people all over the world get their news. For most twitter, facebook and other social networking site users, posting an update has become more vital than the issue itself. This I say because, Shoaib Athar, known as @ReallyVirtual, live tweeted the raid in which Osama Bin Laden was killed at Abottabad, without knowing he was making news.

By the time Obama had hit the airways and addressed the people, Laden’s death had spread across Twitter and all the other social networking sites. @GhostOsama (a parody of OBL tweeting from the grave) had been created and this account has over 41,131 followers and growing. Here’s a list of interesting tweets about OBL.

Not everything that was tweeted or updated Sunday night was entirely accurate. This is because journalistic conventions of double checking and triple checking don’t apply to twitter. Compromised accuracy is the price you have to pay if you’re on social media.

Twitter reached an all-time record on number tweets being posted at one time. Users sent an average of 3,000 tweets per second from 9:45 p.m. Sunday to 1:20 a.m. Monday. Facebook fanpage ‘Osama Bin Laden Dead’ had gone viral. Whether or not social media stays, this incident will be discussed as a caselet in Media Studies for years to come.