Social media, SEO, marketing and writingThe Twitter Effect: How 140 Character Micro-Blogging Can BeneTweet Your Company
Twitter is often described as a free micro-blogging and social networking service that you can use to send quick text messages or ‘tweets’ to friends and followers, no more than 140 characters long. While this may be a factually correct description, it only scratches the surface of how Twitter is being utilized as a revolutionary communications platform.
Since Twitter is hardware agnostic, you can access Twitter using hundreds of different devices. This flexibility is just one of the reasons the use of Twitter is spreading so fast. Anytime, anywhere accessibility means that users can tweet from anywhere–and they are! From the front lines of war zones, to sporting events, family vacations, the local conference event–anywhere you can see or do you can tweet about.
Recently a colleague of mine asked me about Twitter. He heard I was using it to conduct research, promote my blog, and provide assistance to others. “I don’t get it,” he said. “Why would anyone use Twitter? Especially a Fortune 100 company? I just don’t see how it’s useful or effective.”
I could relate to her. You see, I felt the same way only a month or so ago when I first joined Twitter. I posted a few comments, followed a few people, conducted a couple of advanced searches on topics of interest. Yawn. You mean to tell me people are tweeting about taking their children to soccer practice? Tweeting about what they are eating? Posting on topics such as gastronomical pains? Here are three sample tweets (actual Twitter posts):
- I ate donuts all weekend
- last day of skiing. I went crazy and shredded some mogul
- Lunch with the new employee. I’m officially The Man now
Why on earth would I spend my valuable time sorting through thousands of comments like these concerning the mundane happenings of so many ordinary lives?
Then I started noticing other tweets like these:
- FREE widget creation tool. http://tinyurl.com/8jplw4
- New report shows Flash is poor choice for navigation design: http://tinyurl.com/7bp2je PS: Real world testing shows search engines can’t see the keyword buckets
- Nice viral marketing campaign. Click through the site till you see the surprise ending! http://tinyurl.com/3bp1ju
Hmmm. Links to resources, collaborative research findings, online marketing case studies. I searched deeper and found tweets like these:
- Wholefoods So far, we have not identified any products that contain the implicated peanut butter. We will post more details in The Whole Story shortly
- LanceArmstrong Kicked off the LS Global Campaign today at Royal Adelaide Hospital with Premier Rann, Federal Treasurer Swann and many others. Here we go
- DellOutlet Coupons coming for select Dell Outlet laptops & desktops! Not combinable w/ other coupons. Online only. Limit 2 PCs/customer. Expire 1/19/ 09
- Zappos CES attendees: Intel party. For non-VIP entry say passwd “goat” at door
- JetBlue Winter weather in the Northeast may cause delays or cancellations. Check your flight’s status at http://www.jetblue.com/flig…
Wow! Official tweets from companies, celebrities, CEO’s and even politicians. Tweets on a wide range of topics such as crisis management, news & event coverage, product discounts, networking opportunities, and even proactive customer service! With my online marketing noggin now fully engaged, I started thinking about Twitter as a strategy for a businesses or individuals looking to build their brand, increase sales, and/or create awareness. The possibilities are endless (and exciting).
As an outreach strategy, I identified eight obvious areas of focus that any person or organization could capitalize on by using Twitter:
- Sales & marketing
- Reputation management
- Social advocacy
- Crisis management
- Customer care / help
- News & event coverage
- Networking / employment
- Research & development
And how to utilize Twitter in each of the above eight areas? Here are four simple ways to engage with the Twitter.com site:
- Search - Use Twitter to find people, topics of interest, companies to follow, etc.
- Follow - Use Twitter to track all those you deem worthy of following (anytime they post, it’s added to your Twitter home page
- Post - Try contributing content (give advice, insights, tips, special offers, research links, event coverage, rebuttal to negative news, etc.) by either posting one tweet at a time, or better yet, tie in your blog posts and your other online contributions to Twitter automatically using FriendFeed or any number of feed services available online
- Interact - Customize the design of your Twitter profile, send direct messages to people and form new relationships, interact with the official Twitter blog, connect all your devices (like your Blackberry, iPhone, etc), and more!
So what are you waiting for? The best way to see for yourself how Twitter can ‘benetweet’ your company, website, blog, product or service is to dive right in and start tweeting today.
January 27th, 2009 at 4:02 pm
Thanks for taking the time to write this.
It is very helpful and informative (especially for new people). It seems we all think the same thing when starting on Twitter. At first I wondered, why am I here?
February 2nd, 2009 at 1:15 am
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February 16th, 2009 at 3:59 pm
Hi, Jon. You’ve taken a deep dive into the world of Twitter. Thanks. On a semi-related note (and hopefully useful to your readers), I use the following analogies to help people understand social media. Facebook is like a Pub — a great place to get to know people in a casual atmosphere. LinkedIn is like a Trade Show — slightly more formal, but still a great place to make connections. YouTube is like Times Square on New Years Eve: you have to be naked to get any attention. And Twitter is like a cocktail party — lots of conversations going on, many of them interesting, some of them not. Hope that helps! See you, Jamie Turner
February 17th, 2009 at 9:16 am
[...] Power of RT’s In previous blog posts I have written about the Twitter Effect and the growing movement known as social networking. Retweets are a fun part of this phenomenon [...]