By Rachel Siah, Integrated Marketing Executive
Twitter is a tool for “micro-blogging” or posting very short updates, comments and thoughts. With limitation of 140 characters, Twitter was designed to be compatible with mobile phones through text messages. The most suitable metaphor I have found for describing Twitter is to liken it to a cross between instant messaging and a chat room, because it is an open forum yet you can restrict it to the people you connect with.
I have to admit; I have not always been sold on Twitter.
At first I thought I understood it, but thought it was pretty useless as a marketing tool and redundant as a personal networking tool since I am already on Facebook. In fact, Twitter scares me. For all its popularity, Twitter simultaneously leaves some people with a feeling of not being connected or not being in the loop. By elevating the importance of being constantly updated, Twitter ironically amplifies the feeling of missing out on something if you are not checking for updates or twittering with enough frequency. Of course, I may be wrong on this one since it looks like about a hundred-to-one in favour of Twitter. Take a look at info-graphic of Twitters meteoric rise compared to Facebook here.
Despite the stagnant growth in Twitter’s unique visits, the number of tweets did not stop growing. In fact, it was chancing upon GigaTweet that brought my attention back to Twitter. The real time statics of total number of tweets at GigaTweet showed no signs of a pause, not even for a millisecond!! Again, this astonishing founding of the Twitter’s global usage scares me. Putting my negative perception towards Twitter aside, I finally logged in to my Twitter account that has been inactive since the day it was created (out of curiosity). It is only after following some people and having more followers that I start to think it has some value after all, especially as a marketing and PR tool.
Here are some ideas how you can use Twitter to your advantage:
1) A less time consuming and hassle-free engagement with prospects, customers, bloggers or other influencers since it is limited to 140 characters per update. Definitely good for posting thoughts and comments for people on the go!
2) Keep in touch with your industry friends. Making friends on Twitter is really easy, simply by following people and most of the time they will follow you back.
3) Monitor conversations about your company or brand on Twitter through Twitter’s own search engine. You can even subscribe these searches via RSS to keep yourself constantly updated. Another tip is that you can follow all the people you find talking about your company. If they are talking about your company, they would probably be pretty happy that someone from the company wants to follow them! A study has also shown that 20% of tweets contain brand name. (Source: Penn Olsen)
4) Announce exclusive offers, deals or sales instantly and virally.
5) Live updates on events or conferences, even to announce last minute changes.
6) Post links to promote blog articles, webinars and interesting news. If you have a really long URL, use TinyURL to take a long URL and make it short.
7) Have conversations on Twitter by using the @ symbol before someone’s Twitter username. This makes their username a link to their profile. It is not exactly like instant messaging, but it is sort of like a publicity broadcast IM service.
It is remarkable that an enjoyable and meaningful web service can be created out of something as simple as 140 character text segments. Twitter thrives on its ecosystem – the growing army of users, programmers and designers that are coming up with ways to make the Twitter experience more fulfilling.
A few of my personal favourite Twitter-based applications that you may find useful:
1) Twitterholic: This application lists the top 100 users of Twitter ranked by their number of followers.
2) Twittervision: This mesmerizing Twitter/Google Maps mashup displays Twitter messages in real time, via Google Maps. You will see a Twitterer posts a message in Singapore, and then watch as the map zooms over to a Thailand or Japan-based Twitterer instantly!
3) RSS2Twitter: With RSS2Twitter, you can easily set up any RSS feed (including blogs and news sites) to be delivered to your Twitter account. This means that RSS updates can easily be delivered to your mobile phone via Twitter, which is useful if you want to keep track of something. You can even filter updates with “include only with” and “exclude with” functions.
4) Twitterfeed.com: Similar to RSS2Twitter, except Twitterfeed makes it very simple for you to post your blog entries to Twitter and even Facebook .
5) Twitteriffic: Twitteriffic is a fun application that lets you read and publish posts or “tweets” on Twitter specifically for Mac users. You can also customise navigation of the interface and control Twitterific with AppleScript.
(Source: http://twitter.pbwiki.com/)
As a tool with many flexible uses, it is likely that we will see individuals integrating Twitter with all sorts of interesting applications in the future. With simplicity and flexibility which makes Twitter a winner, it does appear to me that Twitter is here to stay.
Social poster
Downloads
- No documents for download.
