What the tweet is it all about?

Now I’m not going to claim to be ground-breaking following my newly created Twitter account, in fact until last week I was a bit of a sceptic, but as is partly the purpose of this blog I wanted and intend to test all forms of social media and plan on maximising my companies exposure through social media whilst minimising the amount of time invested in achieving this goal. In a future blog I will explain how I am using Twitter to fully tweet my messages but for this post I would like to focus on Twitter the social media tool.

So I’m confident you have all heard of twitter following the mass media coverage it has received over the past months with many celebrities and even politicians using it (it was part of Barack Obama’s campaign) But in case you haven’t the concept is that you can ‘Tweet’ your message which is made up of 140 characters and contact all your followers with one single message. The idea was inspired by MSN Messenger where it is possible to add an out of office/ away to lunch message according to co-founder Biz Stone, Biz and the other two co-founders decided to create a prototype and insisted that family and friends use it, at first they were reluctant, but following a minor earthquake many turned to twitter to get a message of their safety out to friends and family instead of using the phone to contact everyone individually – this was a real moment in Twitters history when they realised that there was a use for Twitter. The other was when the plane was landed on the Hudson River and Twitter seemed to be ahead of the media in delivering the news! According to Sue Robinson from the School of Journalism at the University of Wisconsin told the Daily Campus “It was a kind of mass network journalism, or crowd sourcing is another term for it. A lot of people are writing in, and that mass, that collection of data, creates the news story.”

So Twitter had arrived and had a respectable following for a social media site, but it was when celebrities began to use it that it really took off. It is claimed that when American celebrity Oprah Winfrey ‘Tweeted’ live on her show traffic to the Twitter site increased by 43%. The site has grown in the number of users dramatically, from half a million in February 2008 to seven Million a year later and in the past four months it is thought to have grown beyond 10 million, but there is a downside. According to a study by Harvard University, 10% of Twitter users generate 90% of the content where as on a typical social media website the top 10% of users generate 30% of content. It also claims that more than half of people using Twitter updated their page once every 74 days. This research has led to the longevity of the site being questioned, will Twitter survive the hype?

It is our belief following our brief experience that Twitter is here to stay, it is just the way in which it is marketed and used that needs re-defining.

On the Twitter home page it claims that:

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

But it is our belief that users do not want to share the same information with family, friends and colleagues and do not want to use Twitter to communicate personal information. In fact as a personal tool for communicating I am not convinced that Twitter has any future, but as a commercial tool for businesses to promote their services and to maintain continued contact with the clients who are interested it is ideal. In a matter of 140 characters it is possible to remind customers of your company and direct them to your website.

An additional bonus of Twitter is the way in which it now connects to varying applications, we believe it has become a useful SEO tool and an excellent way of generating inbound links. In a future post I will share with you how I am now using Twitter to create at least 3 in bound links to my post whilst writing my post – through blogging I am creating in bound links using Twitter (without even logging into Twitter) which will help to further promote my blog and website.

So now you know what the tweet it’s all about don’t you think you should get tweeting?

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