Twitter’s popularity is probably because it is easy to understand, and easy to use. That may sound simplistic, but imagine where else it is possible to instantly reach out to millions by just writing a few words totaling less than 140 characters!
The ease of use becomes apparent if you also happen to use other social media platforms like Facebook, MySpace, and others for your needs.
Twitter was started in July 2006, exactly 3 years back. It popularized the concept of microblogging, and rode on rising popularity to break into the top 50 most popular online destination in the US for the first time in June last. It now has over 20 million visitors.
People have varied experience with Twitter. It is profoundly enriching for big businesses like Dell that has booked more than $3 million in revenue attributable to its Twitter posts.
Not so rewarding for many common users as is evident from high number of quitters from Twitter. According to this report, 60% of Twitter’s US users don’t return a month later.
Rewarding or not, Twitter’s upward graph continues. Some recent indications suggest that Twitter’s strong showing has perhaps just commenced. Here are a few of them that I feel are important for my being a Twitterer:
- According to a recent report in Telegraph, the US consumer electronics retailer Best Buy in what may be a global first has advertised for a marketing role with one of the qualifications being at least 250 followers on Twitter.
- IZEA, the social media marketer, is currently accepting early signups for Tweeters who want to have their Tweets sponsored, yet another first.
- The first sighting of Britney Spears’ new back-to-school commercial for Candie’s was on Twitter, and not on TV or theaters hitherto done.
- Recently, YouTube has introduced the service of automatically posting about your new video upload to your Twitter and Facebook accounts – an indication of Twitter’s growing stature in the field of social media.
Some Useful Twitter tools
While understanding Twitter is fairly easy, what really stands out is the delight of using the seemingly endless tools that Twitter supports. The sophistication of many tools, interactive as they mostly are, will pleasantly surprise you. And you will often be left marveling at what all you can do with Twitter.
TweetDeck for example is a charm to use. It sits on your desktop independent of Twitter (though you need an initial login) and allows you to manage any number of Twitter accounts, and even your Facebook contacts.
Supr from StumbleUpon stable is my personal favorite. 3 other tools I found good in my initial days in Twitter are dailyrt, Twitlogo, and the Wibiya toolbar.
There are many more…
Hundreds of Twitter tools are there for possibly any need you can think of. A good idea to remain in touch is to bookmark a webpage like this one by Matthew Tommasi that continually updates the list of Twitter tools.
I’ve started liking some new arrivals to the brief list of my favorites (admittedly I haven’t seen many of them). For example, twitcam is a nifty tool that lets you post streaming video to your posts. You only need a webcam for that.
With Damon Cortesi’s TweepSearch you can search the bios of any Twitter user and find out his/her friends and followers.
wefollow is a directory of users who have indicated their identities via tags. Some popular tags are blogger, blogging, socialmedia, internetmarketing, and some bland ones like actor, musician, writer, comedy, and so on.
To repeat, why Twitter?
I recently asked a close friend to become a user of Twitter. She declined saying, “I am a private person. I don’t like to share what I’m doing with others.”
She is obviously wrong because no one really shares personal details on Twitter. Yet I can’t blame her because I too believed so till I ultimately went past the ‘hurdle’ to join Twitter.
Let the self-righteousness of whether or not to share ‘what you are doing’ with others not be a worry! Twitter may be the perfect medium for you to reach out to the unseen millions on the web.
There are news that Twitter is about to change soon laying stress on revenue generation. It has recently published Twitter 101 presumably directed at businesses that use or plan to use it. Among other information there, the list of best practices for businesses affords a good insight to what works well in Twitter.
So…, happy twittering!
 This article of July 25th, 2009 is authored by Partha Bhattacharya, who runs this website. Catering to the clients' video needs aside, Partha also writes guest articles for other web publications. |
