The publication Business weekly this week published an article on Twitter, which made me think that I should really write or “blog” something about it:Twitter is a social media service that is a cross between SMS text messages and Blogs. Twitter otherwise known as “microblogging”, has become hugely popular with traffic on Twitter exploding within the past couple of months. The basic concept is that you can subscribe to get short and brief commentary in the form of live alerts from other members by SMS, Instant Messenger or Email. You can also choose to follow your favorite users and get updates from (Yes basically the status feature from Facebook)
If my description doesn’t make sense here’s the basics from Wikipedia:
“Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send “updates” (or “tweets”; text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) to the Twitter website, via short message service (e.g. on a cell phone), instant messaging, or a third-party application such as Twitterrific or Facebook. Users can receive updates via the Twitter website, instant messaging, SMS, RSS, email or through an application.” >With such a large user base, businesses are now looking to use twitter as a channel to talk to customers. Media groups in the U.S. are using users of Twitter (Twitterers) to gain first minute news.
Currently I do not use twitter for personal reasons. I have tried in the past to try and drive traffic to websites through it. Although due to a lack of following this didn’t help! If you are already a well followed blogger or forum user then Twitter could benefit you though. Here’s a just three ways of how it can help you:
1) It can help to build yourself into a brand
2) Could be used to drive traffic to your website
3) Allows you to follow leaders of industries and colleagues on the go via SMS. This could work well If you or colleagues go out in the field. It will let them use it to keep one another updated with deals etc.
