Twitter. It’s all over the news lately and has millions of subscribers. I signed up for an account when I first read about it last year, got confused, then bored, and never did even a single “tweet.”
Twitter is a “microblogging” tool that lets you post very short messages, or “tweets” (140 characters or less) about what you’re doing. You can let your friends know what you’re up to, or let anyone else “follow” you. And you can post and receive messages via email, IM and cell phone.
But the problem is that most of these short posts are meaningless, time-wasting drivel, which would be fine with me if they weren’t also so crushingly boring. Who on earth wants to read their friend’s dullest moment-by-moment details, never mind the details of dozens of strangers they may be following?
I figured I am probably missing something, in the same way that for years I didn’t get the point of text messaging, and I still don’t get the point of Facebook, Plurk, Pownce and Myspace in the business world. Also, just because boring people write boring things on Twitter doesn’t mean it’s the medium’s fault. So I spent a bit of time googling and thinking about it.
Here are some ways I’ve found to use Twitter as a business tool:
- For teams working on a project: Communicate instantly and have a log of everything. Everyone who is a part of the team can see the same information and respond if needed. In addition, the messages are logged on the Twitter site. All communication is retrievable for future references.
- Drive traffic to your blog or website: When an article you write or a site update goes live, you can let everyone know — and hear their feedback– by Twitter.
- Keep up with the buzz in your industry: By using Twitter to follow leaders in your industry, you can stay in touch with what’s going on. Many bloggers will list their Twitter accounts on their blogs — by following the person in Twitter you can gather new information even before it hits the blog.
- Build credibility and expertise: Post questions for quick answers and answer others’ questions to establish your credibility and expertise
- Network with people in your industry.
How it might be put to practical use:
- A restaurant tweets their daily specials
- A ticket agency tweets about-to-expire tickets
- A realtor tweets new homes on the market
- A chamber of commerce tweets local events and promotions.
- A catalog company tweets their sale items, or brand new items just in
- A customer service department tweets their questions or issues to each other and their supervisors
- An artist, artisan or manufacturer tweets customers about their latest creation
- Buyers tweet each other about new product discoveries while they are at trade shows or Market
- Convention exhibitors tweet to customers about convention specials
Hmmm… maybe Twitter isn’t the dumbest waste of time after all! What are your opinions?
Sources: Social Media Today, Flyte New Media
July 22nd, 2008 at 2:46 am
I’m with you on the part of not getting into Twittering. The name itself sounds silly. Makes me think of “twit”. I have to say you made a few valid points of Twittering being a marketing tool, but why? I guess it would depend on the age range you would market to. OK, well I agree ~ maybe it’s not the dumbest waste of time, but I just don’t get “it” and frankly…don’t want to get “it”. I think Twitters just do it because they are bored or just want to be called a Twitt-er.
July 25th, 2008 at 3:52 pm
Nope, I do not get it either. I have been trying to.
July 25th, 2008 at 5:51 pm
I can’t see myself ever adopting twitter either. I use text messaging to send short time-sensitive notes to people or small groups of people, emails to send longer notes that usually aren’t as time-sensitive, and this blog to muse about things. I may give Twitter a try for a week or two and see if it’s as great as everyone says, but I can see myself just posting ridiculous things to be funny, which is a waste of everyone’s time.
July 30th, 2008 at 6:13 am
There are a ton of cool Twitter visualizations that help to see the breadth of information on Twitter.
http://twistori.com/#i_believe
http://explore.twitter.com/blocks/
http://www.wefeelfine.org (down at the moment)
July 30th, 2008 at 8:49 am
Kendall, those are some cool links. The twistori one was an interesting experiment of gathering all twitters that start with “I love” or “I believe” etc. I particularly loved the crankiness of the “I hate” stream– very funny. Those short scrolling messages remind me of the artist Jenny Holzer.
August 4th, 2008 at 10:05 pm
Yes, my first post (finally) on your blog. Ugh, how busy am I that it’s taken me almost a month to look? Although maybe instead of “ugh” it should be “hooray”. I’m reserving judgment on that.
But that brings me to my biggest issue with anything social networking related – exactly when am I supposed to do it?
I’m sure that Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and all the rest have great tools and functionality incorporated into all the time-wasting features, but for someone that’s already burning the candle at both ends, I’m just not sure how much more I want / need to keep up with everyone.
Phew. It feels good to rant a little. Looking forward to keeping up with you via the blog! (Wait, did I just add something else to my weekly To Do list?)
August 5th, 2008 at 7:28 am
I’m with you on that, Don. Spending time on social networks is a whole lifestyle change really, and one that I’m not sure is very beneficial to my bottom line (my financial one, and my other one which should really be exercising, not chatting). That said, there seems to have been an explosion of friends on facebook lately, and I have found people from high school and college I haven’t seen for 20 years, which is a bit exciting. Anything that popular means there is business potential waiting to be tapped, but I guess we have to pick our venues.