Lots of people talk about Twitter, and everyone who talks about it acts as if their opinion is gospel fact. The real truth— no one knows how this is going to pan out. It could turn out that it revolutionizes everything, or that is collapses under its own business plan.
While I’d be hesitant to believe people who say this changes “everything,” (remember, they live in a world where everybody uses this stuff)— it is certainly a helpful addition to your Thought Leadership arsenal. And, because of the amount of press coverage and buzz surrounding it, you’ll look a little behind the times if you don’t tweet every now and then.
So, skip this section if you’re using Twitter already and have at least 50 followers.
There’s nothing more I can tell you.
For the uninitiated— Twitter is a micro-blog, which allows you to broadcast short messages quickly and easily. It also allows you to pay attention to other people, but not as quickly or easily. The trick is that (like all other marketing) you have almost no control over whether anyone actually receives your message.
Your short messages, or Tweets (which can only be 140 characters or less), will only be received by the people who “follow” you (think of them as subscribers to your broadcasts). In the same way, you will receive the messages being broadcast by people you follow.
Finally, you can search all the broadcasts being made, as they are being made. You can do this to find particular words or phrases (things that interest you) or to look for trends and patterns (things that interest other people).
That’s it.
As you can imagine, there are all sorts of useful things people can do with this. You can blast out messages about yourself and your company. You can have conversations with other people who are online at the same time as you (this is like a cross between a chat room and shouting across a bar). You can find out what people are interested in and talking about. You can re-broadcast useful, informative, or entertaining things other people have published. You can provide interesting micro-content and links to “normal” content. You can brag about how many followers you have.
Twitter is much easier to understand if you’ve actually seen it. So go ahead and sign up for an account at twitter.com, and read their “Twitter 101” guide for additional information.
It’ll change everything.
