Twitter for Business Still Asks: What Are You Doing Now?
Published December 15, 2008 by Jeff Selin
With each post in this blog, I take about 20 seconds to “tweet” about it. Do you use Twitter as a personal or professional information channel—perhaps both? I’d love to hear your experiences. Are you following Barack Obama, Shaquille O’neal, or Interspire co-founder Mitchell Harper?
Our preoccupation with staying “hyper-connected” (as Twitter named it) and the technology that it fosters are helping blur the lines of our personal and professional lives. While some non-tweeting voices of an older generation have argued that such online technologies interfere with “true” connection, Twitter fans prove these judgments are an anachronism. We are in fact more communicative and tighter than ever, globally linked in dozens of online communities, spreading Internet meme faster than sociologists can record.
Twitter is among the fastest growing social networks. About 3 million times each day, the 140-character limit “tweet” attracts some percentage of Twitter’s 200,000 weekly users. According to TechCrunch, Twitter has 1 million total users. And Popacular.com runs a GigaTweet counter, claiming over a billion tweets and counting since Twitter launched in 2006.
The marketing masthead opportunities on Twitter are obvious. You can share headlines and updates about your products and services to your followers; devotees who want to be plugged into your up-to-the-moment tweets through pretty much whatever Web or mobile technology suits them. But Twitter also offers an accepted medium for professionals to be more personable, more vulnerable, exposing something genuine about their workaday lives and their humanity in juicy bite-sized tidbits.
I might tweet at work, then go home and tweet under the same login. “In Heathrow, waiting. Flight delay. Burrito juice dripping down arm.” Why does one care? Tweets in this case can have a compound effect, exposing aspects of daily life that become extraordinary for the very fact that the information is prosaic. “Finally boarding. Seat 24d in back. Headed home to AU. Miss my dog, Flounder.” Followers register a sense of connection by comparison—and here’s exactly what I’m doing now. You can get what Twitter cofounder Evan Williams calls “ambient awareness.” For me, it’s the same feeling as when I move from email to instant messaging. I feel as though I’m behind the scenes, with you while you’re typing.
Social media technology keeps blurring and redefining communication lines: how, when and why we connect, social contracts for proper etiquette, the speed and quantity of responses. With each innovation comes a new set of expectations for continuous sharing of news, thoughts, ideas and often banal, daily information that keeps listeners apprised and up to the second. Once adopted by enough people in enough social situations, businesses follow suit, adapting their plans to tryout a new tool and marketing channel. So it was with IM, blogging, YouTube… and now Twitter. It’s free, simple, cool, fun, informative, useful and for many, an extraordinary way to never unplug. And it's addictive—like intravenous networking drugs for a growing percentage of bloggers.
Twitter might not stay free for marketers for long. Mr. Williams replied to Fast Company’s question earlier this year: “When and how will Twitter start making money?”
"If people are using Twitter for commercial purposes—and a lot of people already are—then we won't feel bad about charging those people. It will take some experimenting to figure out exactly what the model is. Fundamentally, we're working on building the value right now. We think the value is in the network and the value is in ease of communication. We can tap into that value and extract revenue in many different ways."
Even if you’re not gung-ho about micro-blogging throughout your day, sharing updates from your blog, PR department, product team or services offers an additional, free option for loyal fans and customers to receive information and stay in touch. You can find us at twitter.com/interspire. In this case, micro-blogging blog posts, there’s an acceptable Twitter community format: simply the title of the blog post followed by a link to the full blog post. To ensure we stay inside the 140-character limit, we use tinyurl.com to convert long URL paths to aptly named tiny ones. You can also use TweetBurner to shorten the URL and cut & paste it into your tweet.
This is one of the numerous Twitter “mashups”—that is, Twitter mashed together with other applications. Some of these make strides toward superior usability for marketers and other professionals on Twitter. Here are a few of the twenty or so out there, with many more percolating.
TwitBlogs for macro blogging
TwitPic for photo sharing over Twitter
SplitTweet if you have multiple Twitter accounts in your company
TweetDeck for managing and following tweets to manage your tweets in bite sized chunks
TweetStats to track your analytics and stats
Mail2Twitter to Tweet from any email enabled mobile device
TwitterCounter is a widget you can add to your macro blog to show how followers you have
TwitBin is one of eight or so Firefox plugins for Twitter. This one allows you to send and receive tweets.
TwitterCal lets you connect your Twitter account to your Google Calendar
There’s no lack of information pointing the way to Twitter as an outstanding marketing channel. It’s a great method for staying additionally connected. If you blog regularly or offer RSS feeds, if your active in other online social networks like FaceBook or MySpace, there’s no reason not to add Twitter as another point of connection. Simply creating an account may not pave the road to 10,000 followers overnight, but with the cost at zero and the time needed so minuscule, it’s worth a try. You might just discover that tweeting is addictive.
For more news and stats on Twitter, check out this blog: twitterfacts.blogspot.com. For business background, CrunchBase has a decent Twitter company profile.
Okay, I’m off to tweet about it.
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