What is Twitter and why use it?
This is the second in a series of three articles on Twitter.
In the spirit of this marketing blog, this article will explore what Twitter is, what and who it’s for, and why you should start to use it as part of your ever-growing marketing mix.
What is it?
Don’t you just love buzzwords? Micro-blogging (Twitter’s official definition) and social networking are combined in Twitter, allowing a user to send snippets of their everyday life in 140 characters or less to a loyal group of followers. If it sounds odd/useless/a waste of time, it’s really not – just ask the 2.2 million registered users of Twitter who use it, including big names like Barack Obama, the BBC, BBC News, the Guardian, Dell, and many more.
What’s it for?
Anything you want it to be. Twitter doesn’t have to be all about business, nor does it have to be all about your daily habits and routines. What it does innately is increase your transparency as a corporate or personal brand and allow you to open up to those following you (or searching for you). Twitter offers user insight that even blogs can’t offer due to its 1) 140 character limit – enforcing succinctness, and 2) following concept, where you can follow anyone using the service that interests you. Interested in Web Design? Use the Twitter Search and follow anyone discussing Wordpress or CSS. Love Food? Search and follow.
Who’s it for?
If you read my last post on Gladwell’s 3 agents of change, you’ll likely fall into one of the 3 types, otherwise you wouldn’t be here, right? Although it’s currently full of a savvy tech crowd who are hungry for information, news, events, tricks, new posts, and interacting with one another, Twitter is open to anyone who wants to ‘get connected’. Following on the example above with Barack Obama using Twitter, just look at his measly 65k followers and you can be pretty certain that 75% of them aren’t fanatical tech-heads!
Me + Twitter
As far as early adoption goes, I’m embarrassed to say I was a bit narrow-minded with Twitter. I roughly understood the concept, but felt daunted and annoyed by the thought of updating what really is a Facebook status message with mundane information about my life. What was worse was assuming people whom I’ve never met even cared what I did last night or what TV show I was watching.
But, fast-forward 60 days, and I’m a true Twitter believer. Diving into the Tweetiverse and meeting all the Tweeple (OK, I’ll stop the cheese), I started to appreciate what it is, what it does, and ironically how it fills a void that I never knew needed filling. The thing is, when you think about it, haven’t most of today’s successful ideas created something that no one realized they needed until it was actually created? By creating a virtual demand and being the only supplier, Twitter has most definitely set the scene for creating their own tipping point.
Follow me on Twitter at www.twitter.com/Aizlewood
Update:
This video perfectly encapsulates what Twitter is, in an easily-digestible format
The next article will address how to use Twitter for marketing. Stay tuned!
August 27th, 2008 at 10:43 am
Great series on Twitter.
Whether or not the tipping point comes remains to be seen.
I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again here, Facebook should buy Twitter and seamlessly merge the two. It would solve Twitter’s infrastructure/cash problems, connect Facebook to the Twitterverse, and allow simultaneous updating of statuses (if you so desire). Then it might tip over into the mainstream.
What I most love about the Twitter story is that they were never too sure what it was they were creating. They had a simple idea, multi-casting of SMS messages, and one key idea, asking us to answer the question “What are you doing?”.
Facebook have now put that question into its own status update box and I’m convinced that updates have become a lot more popular and prevalent on the Facebook platform since they did that.
Also the @ convention to reply to others has turned it into a really powerful micro-blogging/comments tool. FriendFeed does this really well and someone like RobertScoble creates a mini-storm whenever he mentions a new tool or idea.
Personally I’ve got four Twitter accounts:
One to update friends on where I am and what I’m doing, great for spontaneous social gatherings.
A second passing inspiring Buddhist “Thought for the day” wisdom to followers of a Buddhist teacher (http://twitter.com/geshekelsang)
A third to pass Douglas Adams quotes (http://twitter.com/douglasadams)
And a fourth to update a section on a website I maintain (http://twitter.com/integralsalon)
Sounds complicated, but once set up it really is the easiest way to update 100s of (different types of) people in a less than two minutes.
Looking forward to more in this series.
August 27th, 2008 at 5:49 pm
Tweets are limited to 140 characters, but I believe it is a lot more to it then that. People need to stop thinking of Twitter as a “micro-blogging” service, and start looking at it like a platform, or operating system. I have blogged a ton about Twitter lately on my blog. Everyday, I think of (and learn of) new ways to use Twitter (I just posted about some NEW ways that businesses can use Twitter)
VOIP? Phweep
Find out about a Start-up (funding…founder,etc) send a Tweet to @cbbot . Want to cheat at scrabble? @ wordbot
Just today, Mozilla announced Ubiquity that will work with Twitter. There are already a few hundred applications that are utilizing the Twitter app. Everyone, and every business can benefit from Twitter. Take your blog as an example … By simply using twitterfeed, anyone in Twitterville can automatically learn of your new posts (It posts the URL and a brief summation as a Tweet).
http://www.twitter.com/A_F
September 8th, 2008 at 4:08 pm
And now, as it turns out, you’re nobody if you’re not on twitter (at least according to the song: http://tinyurl.com/6dvzef