I am sure many of you have heard of Twitter by now, I am also sure that just as many of you have written Twitter off as just another waste of time social media tool that only nerds and marketers like myself take part in. Almost everyone I talk to, knows what Twitter is, but right away tells me that they would never take part in such a stupid thing.
For all of the uninitiated, Twitter is basically Facebook with just the status updates, people on Twitter follow your updates or you follow other peoples, and in turn it creates a social network of people who micro-blog by tweeting (the verb for making updates on your twitter account) instead of being friends and sharing photos and playing Jewish Geography, twitter is a bit more professional and clean cut than Facebook and Myspace.
I joined Twitter to market my blog and share links and at first I too was skeptical, was this just another tried and failed social networking tool – there are hundreds of them – who would actually join this thing? Then the elections hit and the world saw the power of twitter, news updates, election updates and peoples as well as famous peoples opnions were flying around twitter like mad. It was then that I noticed everyone was on twitter sharing quick tidbits or quick sales with their followers.
From computer companies to airlines to nail polish removal to landscaping companies, seems that everyone is getting on the twitter bandwagon. I tell my friends to join merely for the random sales, Jet Blue for instance will put up daily sales that are only available to twitter followers, as would companies like dell and radio shack – its quite interesting and just like Facebook you can privatize your account so only your friends see updates.
Twitter is great for quick information and quick messages, it doesn’t require a long page load because profiles contain little more then a quick bio, photo and website link. I should mention that all tweets are limited to 140 characters, so things tend to be updated quite quickly with some folks updating 20-30 times per day. I update an average of 3 times per day. You can also link your twitter to your facebook account so it transfers your updates here.
Follow me on Twitter and then look through my followers to find your favorite bloggers as well