Well, this week I finally started using Twitter - a very cool social networking tool. Twitter is like a really simple, mini-blog. It’s quite elegant in its simplicity and effectiveness at creating and distributing “many-to-many conversations; that is, you can track many conversations by “following” other people, and your “followers” track you.
Talk about “word-of-mouth”! Twitter is word-of-mouth on steroids, since it broadcasts to each person’s entire network of followers.
Twitter by itself is pretty powerful, but when combined with other tools it becomes extremely powerful. For example, you’ll notice people on Twitter providing hyperlinks to their websites, blogs, Facebooks, and other stuff using TinyURL.
TinyURL is a nifty service that converts the usual big, ugly, hariry-looking URLs into, well, a smaller URL that generally fits better into Twitter. I saw John Reese using TinyURL, so I picked it up and found it works like a champ (I’d seen it before, but just hadn’t had a good reason to use it before now).
So, Twitter is providing people with a way to opt-in to “conversations” with people they find interesting, want to emulate or learn from or just enjoy following.
By cross-linking Twitter entries with blogs, it’s now possible to provide a richer, two-way communications system that’s much more effective.
Another thing I like about Twitter is that I can get real-time SMS text messages on my iPhone, which I take everywhere with me. I can track the people I follow, and I can make my own Twitter entries from anywhere.
Very nice!
I’ve been reading the Inspired Business Growth blog by Wendy Piersall, which I’ve found to be very insightful, especially for entrepreneurs. The entry on Want to Know What Customers Really Think? Twitter Will Tell You is especially intresting.
As Wendy points out, there are some tremendous uses for Twitter that are already surfacing:
- Watch trends emerge within an extremely tech-savvy and influential group of individuals (many Twitter users are also publishers, bloggers, and new media experts);So, Twitter is a good way to track and interact with these key influencers in your market.
- Get real-time feedback on news stories, product launches and popular services
Twitter could be used to create additional “bonding” with your market place, for launches, community-building projects and just getting to know your customers better.
- Find pain points in consumers’ lives and create / tailor products to relieve that pain Could it be that people in pain might talk about it in their Twitter entries? You bet they do, so if you’re look for “desperate buyers”, could be a good place to find some
- Position your company or brand to become a part of the existing conversation
There’s an amazing amount of “conversation flow” going on out in the blogosphere, social media sites and now Twitter provides yet another way to surface our personal points of view – and on a time granularity that’s probably only rivaled by Instant Messaging and SMS.
Social media is changing how we relate to each other over the Internet. I for one welcome these great innovations – so long as they’re used for “good” and we don’t end up spammed out of existence by them.
The first time I see a Instant Twitter Generator, I’ll probably think seriously about running the other way (in the Internet Marketing area, it seems everyone loves to come up with tools for broadcasting their message around into places it doesn’t belong, in order to get backlinks to their websites).
My Twitter Link is available, if you wanna “Follow” me to see what I’ve been up to lately. Twitter provides a whole new level of “transparency” into our lives, but can also be used effectively to build a relationship and bond with your audience.
I’m getting pretty comfortable with Twitter now – we’ll see how I feel about it in a few months (I’ve only been using it for a few days now, and so far, I have to agree with Wendy – it’s really addictive – even more than the old “CrackBerry” and iPhone
Give Twitter a try or at least use it to search down some of your favorite people and see what they’re up to today – could be interesting.
No tags for this post. Related posts:
Comments on this entry are closed.