ArcelorMittal : Tweeting trailers

Simplicity boosts the attraction of an RSS alternative.

The Site

ArcelorMittal, the Luxembourg-based world-leading steel company, is using Twitter to complement its RSS service for journalists.

ArcelorMittal’s Media section has separate Press Releases and News sub-sections, each giving access to current and archived content. The landing page display in each includes a trademark ‘t’ button to ‘Follow us on Twitter’. It is stacked under a standard orange button for subscribing to an RSS feed. The buttons appear on individual press releases and news stories but nowhere else in the Media section or the wider site.

The Twitter button leads to a company page on the microblogging and social networking service’s site that clocks 388 ‘followers’. It augments message links back to related news and press releases on the ArcelorMittal site with teasers for other Media content, such as items on its Web TV channel, and investor relations announcements.

The Takeaway

ArcelorMittal is a good example of a company that is using Twitter as an alternative to an RSS feed: a way of allowing journalists to sign up and automatically be fed with news items as they are published. (While it includes some financial announcements, the company has so far not extended the scope to an investor relations audience that would surely be no less receptive.)

Although RSS has been around for several years, many people – including surely some journalists – have found it too complex to use and have never set up systems to receive feeds efficiently. By contrast, Twitter is simplicity itself to install and with its reputation for being the first place a news story breaks has become a core tool for many journalists. By plugging into this, corporates are giving themselves an easy way to feed press stories through to their targets. Twitter’s length restriction – 140 characters per message – is no barrier because the aim is always to push journalists to the website. The question now is whether Twitter replaces, rather than simply complements, RSS.

First published on 18 May, 2010