Twitter is the immensely popular micro-blogging and social networking service. You can post short messages, or “tweets.” These tweets are displayed to the people who choose to follow you. Likewise, you can follow the tweets of other people.
Twitter has experienced quadruple-digit growth in the last year as high-profile celebrities like Katie Couric and Ashton Kutcher have adopted the service. By some accounts, Twitter is the third largest social network in the world.
Time Magazine explains in a recent article titled “How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live”:
The basic mechanics of Twitter are remarkably simple. Users publish tweets — those 140-character messages — from a computer or mobile device. (The character limit allows tweets to be created and circulated via the SMS platform used by most mobile phones.) As a social network, Twitter revolves around the principle of followers. When you choose to follow another Twitter user, that user’s tweets appear in reverse chronological order on your main Twitter page. If you follow 20 people, you’ll see a mix of tweets scrolling down the page: breakfast-cereal updates, interesting new links, music recommendations, even musings on the future of education. Some celebrity Twitterers — most famously Ashton Kutcher — have crossed the million-follower mark, effectively giving them a broadcast-size audience. The average Twitter profile seems to be somewhere in the dozens: a collage of friends, colleagues and a handful of celebrities. The mix creates a media experience quite unlike anything that has come before it, strangely intimate and at the same time celebrity-obsessed. You glance at your Twitter feed over that first cup of coffee, and in a few seconds you find out that your nephew got into med school and Shaquille O’Neal just finished a cardio workout in Phoenix.
Skeptics might wonder just how much subversion and wit is conveyable via 140-character updates. But in recent months Twitter users have begun to find a route around that limitation by employing Twitter as a pointing device instead of a communications channel: sharing links to longer articles, discussions, posts, videos — anything that lives behind a URL. Websites that once saw their traffic dominated by Google search queries are seeing a growing number of new visitors coming from “passed links” at social networks like Twitter and Facebook. This is what the naysayers fail to understand: it’s just as easy to use Twitter to spread the word about a brilliant 10,000-word New Yorker article as it is to spread the word about your Lucky Charms habit.
New England Social Media can put together a Twitter campaign for your company. Email us to find out more.