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William Eggleton
When I first was told about what it was that twitter does I resisted joining strongly. Until doing COMP3505 and having to join I was very much against the idea of useless updating of “What are you doing?” all the time and just filling up everyone’s head with more pointless rubbish. However after signing up I found myself ‘tweeting’ all the time. There are many mislaid ideas about the productivity potential for micro-blogging sites, in this case twitter. Twitter provides both an individual and commercial communication tool. I’m going to explore a bit about the idea of twitter being used as a commercial communication tool.
For those of you who don’t already know, Twitter is a micro-blogging tool that allows users to answer the question “What are you doing?” constantly, within 140 characters. Some people do use twitter to report the uninteresting rubbish that they are actually doing like “doing the dishes” or “walking to the bus” but many others use it for sharing links of interesting things they have found on the web as well as a little bit of personal/business info.
Many commercial applications of Twitter are already evident, including politicians positing updates like Barack Obama did throughout his campaign. The BBC, Apple, online retailer Woot, and many more post regular updates throughout the day. These are just a few of the companies that already use twitter to promote their products. The sort of things businesses can use twitter for are: news items, special offers with coupon codes, business news etc.
Twitter also provides a search function which most certainly is a very useful tool in both personal and commercial instances. For instance today I found out that BMW made a customer unhappy and he Twittered about it. I learned that Weather Underground has some really cool iPhone application and that the chocolate cake at Macaroni Grill is deadly.
As a business, researching if your company is getting any tweets can provide invaluable feedback from actual clients if they like/dislike your products or service. This is just another feature of twitter that can be used highly effectively to research for your commercial gain.
When creating a personal brand, the key is not to see it as an individual post more an overall impression and value that is made over time. Each entry is just the beginning of an idea for the overall picture.
Twitter is the fastest growing member community destination online in the last year as seen below.
Fastest Growing Member Community Destinations in February 2009
| RANK | Site | Feb 08 | Feb 09 | % growth |
| 1 | Twitter.com | 475,000 | 7,038,000 | 1382% |
| 2 | Zimbio | 809,000 | 2,752,000 | 240% |
| 3 | Facebook | 20,043,000 | 65,704,000 | 228% |
| 4 | Multiply | 821,000 | 2,394,000 | 192% |
| 5 | Wikia | 1,381,000 | 3,758,000 | 172% |
| source: Nielsen NetView, 2/09, | ||||
Seeing these figures clearly shows the potential influence of successful implementation using twitter as a commercial communication tool. The average user goes to the site 14 times a month and spends average seventeen minutes on the site. However as well as this twitter offers another feature, tweet by text! In January 735 000 different users accessed twitter via a mobile phone, this gives twitter a whole new mobility. The text messaging offers another platform for consumers and businesses to utilise to their advantage.
The wide range of users can be seen by the following table:
Unique Visitors to Twitter.com by Age Demographic
| Age Group | Unique Audience | Composition % |
| 2-17 | 250,000 | 3.6 |
| 18 - 24 | ** | ** |
| 25 - 34 | 1,379,000 | 19.6 |
| 35 - 49 | 2,935,000 | 41.7 |
| 55+ | 1,165,000 | 16.6 |
| 65+ | 477,000 | 6.8 |
| source: Nielsen NetView, 2/09, | ||
This shows the variety of users and again illustrates the potential, if used correctly, to connect with a very large audience.
So even though when I started using twitter I thought it was mindless drivel, I have come to understand and see how much influence it can have if you keep in mind the bigger picture that your tweets portray. It can be a very effective marketing tool for connecting with a very wide user base.
You should think of Twitter as a means to get instant public messages out to your audience, whether it is an audience of colleagues or potential customers.
The key focus is the instant messaging, the wide user base and the invaluable research it can give if used to your advantage.
I hope this will all open your eyes to the possibilities of the use of Twitter.
Below I have provided some links I found useful and also some that are just interesting, enjoy!
Additional resources on using Twitter as a networking, PR and communications tool can be found at:
- Rafe Needleman: Newbies Guide to Twitter
- Caroline Middlebrook: The Big Juicy Twitter Guide
- Jeremiah Owyang - What The Web Strategist Should Know About Twitter
- B.L. Ochman’s What’s Next Blog: How to Write Kickass Twitter Posts
- PR Squared: Using Twitter To Create & Inform Communities
- WebProNews: Microblogging What’s it Good For?
- University of Maryland, Baltimore County: Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities
- Red66 - Using Twitter as a Marketing Tool
- Eleven Marketing- Add Twitter to Your Internet Marketing Toolbox
Tools to make your “twittering” more productive:
- Twitter Groups - Allows you to tag your followers into different groups. Then you can send a message to those groups without needing to send the message to each person one at a time.
- TweetVolume - A frequency search tool to see how often a unique name (person, brand, etc) is mentioned on Twitter.
- Twitter Tools - A huge collection of Twitter tools by platform as well as plugins, web services and widgets.
- All Twitter Tools and Mashups in One Place - Maybe not all, but a very large list of desktop clients, mobile apps, mashups, plugins, tools and widgets.
- Twittown Unofficial Twitter Community which includes Twitter Forge, a listing of Twitter plugins, Ttools, mashups and services.
14 comments:
That's very interesting ，potential feasibility and practicability of Twitter. However, if the related functions do not get near to the change, Twitter may lose vast of its general users. Currently, most Twitter users use it to gain their friends' information more than business. They don't think of commercial information, even dislike it. To achieve this idea, I think Twitter has to solve this problem first.
It is definitely an interesting thought: marketting with Twitter. I do use Twitter to get English Premier League result updates as well as follow the progress on some software I use. I guess marketing isn't that far from this. It's definitely going to be interesting when companies start doing it... Good idea.
@zhoufei
maybe twitter should introduce company accounts (like fan-pages on facebook) which has a little more unique functionality.
Having said that, I do like twitter for its simplicity just the way it is...
I too at first was skeptical about using twitter. I thought it was just going to be useless drivel as well.
However, once I started to follow people and vice versa, I started to see not only how entertaining it can be, but also how useful it can be, by people posting related links to related topics.
I think that the marketing through twitter would be interesting to see. On the other hand, I think if twitter becomes too comercialised it may lose it's luster to the user.
I didn't consider the commercial applications of Twitter before now; it is an interesting point of view. I can see complications in attracting people to follow companies just to receive ads though.
I would have like to have seen a discussion of alternatives such as RSS feeds or Facebook fan pages, as it seems a bit like a one-sided discussion.
It is a really good idea for the shop’s owners to doing the advertisement by using Twitter. However, it might be a huge problem to most of twitter users. As we know, the most of advertisements are not suit for everyone. If I receive a business advertisement which is I am not really interesting, then I will define it to be a joke mail and make me feel feaze.
Interesting!
I believe everything can be made money from. The same as Twitter. To make profit by twittering, however, seems not that easy, based on current function Twitter provides. The flooded worthless information is the key issue. It is tough to sort thing out. You cannot tell a consumer trends by an individual Twitter post. It would be easier for us to gather useful information if Twitter provides filtering and grouping functions. Before having these functions, we still have a long way to go.
Excellent post!
Obviously, Twitter has a large number of growing users, it means people enjoy the functions of the Twitter, especially the simplest interface compare with most softwares, yes, it is a good idea if twitter introduces company accounts which have a little more unique functionality as Dineth said. It would help Twitter to have more users from company in the future.
While I have decided not to continue using Twitter, I agree with your comment "many others use it for sharing links of interesting things they have found on the web" as a few of the Twitter's I've followed are tech personalities and most of their tweets are links to interesting articles and/or products.
In response to what zhoufei stated, I have heard of instances where company representatives have responded to discontent customers, i.e. "Comcast Bob", who works for Comcast and has used Twitter to help customers who have tweeted about issues with their service.
I agree that Twitter has the potential to become an incredibly useful tool to peer into demographics and as a quick communication tool, but only if everyone uses it. It is interesting to watch those real-time Twitter feeds to see just how many people at any moment are tweeting, however.
It sucks having to remember the people who do and do not have these things, and at the moment I only have four or five people who are on Twitter - and one that actively uses it.
On a side note, I dislike how people receive special treatment from companies after they tweet about poor service. What about all those who do not tweet about it? Do they not deserve good service, too? (This was quite irrelevant to the topic)
Twitter grows because of the availability of the client application of it. I also think it is useless, but i agree with the idea of using twitter as a marketing place is brilliant because the user of twitter is growing and lots of application available to make the user keep in touch with it.
Great post...!!
using twitter as a marketing is a good idea. especially when the number of twitter user are growing and there are a lot of application that build so user can have easy access for twitter. I have seen some other example of it also and I think its terrific.
Interesting post. Its true that Twitter can be used for marketing. It may work well especially for small businesses but I'm not sure how well it would scale.
There would just be too much information. The key would to be able to find the valuable information.
Companies and/or organisations utilising Twitter see the potential in this new form of advertising.
Sure that's a very broad thing to say but it makes a lot of sense. It's so much easier to tweet than put an be in the paper or radio..
Has anyone stolen Viller's contacts on his account, notably, UQ news and QLDTransport?
They're so useful.
I was reluctant to change from Myspace to Facebook. Then everyone started using Facebook so i created an account and completely forgot about Myspace.
I think this is different with Twitter because i signed up for Twitter knowing that im gonna keep on using Facebook. I just use Twitter for a reason. I use Twitter to follow festival announcements and im currently following all my favorite bands and they tweet me when they announce shows in Australia. This function is more personal than Facebook, it usually takes days for people to create an event on Facebook and say that im attending it. Have the lead singer of a band Tweeting me so much more useful.
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