Twitter

Twitter is a free real-time short messaging service (SMS).  Messages, known as tweets, can contain up to 140 characters and can be sent through the Web or through mobile devices.  Tweets are intended to answer the simple question: What are you doing?

Features

Each Twitter user has a home page where their tweets are posted.  Users stay informed about what friends, family, colleagues, and even celebrities are doing by subscribing to become “followers” of their tweets.  As users post tweets, the messaging service distributes the tweets to all of the users’ followers.

Users can access Twitter.com by using a computer with a Web browser and Internet connection. Users can also use applications on their computers or mobile devices like TweetDeck, Twhirl, Twitterific, or PocketTweets.

Twitter is appealing to people who:

  • want real-time connectivity with their networked contacts
  • want to be hyper-connected
  • value portable applications
  • like to control the flow of communications

Finding hard numbers about how many actual users Twitter has is difficult as Twitter has yet to release the numbers.  Some sites, like Web-strategist.com, speculate that there are over five million people using Twitter.  Twitter is one of the fastest growing social networking sites on the Internet and the number of actual users is increasing daily.

Benefits

Unlike many social networking tools, Twitter users do not have to be technologically savvy.  Sending tweets is as simple as sending text messages from a mobile device or sending instant messages from a computer.  There are no snazzy page layouts to design or HTML codes to deal with, although users can post a default picture with relative ease.

The simplest way to grow and develop an audience on Twitter is to find those with similar interest. Most Twitter users will only communicate with friends and family, but cultivating an audience for businesses and personalities can produce large dividends. For many companies, social-networking is free ad space used to communicate products to an interested audience. The best companies are able to communicate with humor and product discounts to develop their brand name and increase interest in the product. The interest on Twitter of a certain product/business or personality is gauged by “Followers.” These “Followers” are an engaged audience who receive the tweets the companies or personalities send out. As “Followers” increase, so too does the capacity for an even larger audience to be met. These new “Followers” tell their already engaged “Followers” about the product, who continue this process for infinity. The larger the “Followers” audience, the more marketable a company or personality becomes.

With so many users staying connected through real-time messaging, organizations like the Society for Technical Communication can benefit from using Twitter as a networking tool.  People like James Ventura and Jimmy Chin who like to use social networking to communicate with other professionals can use Twitter to stay in touch with contacts.  Groups can use Twitter to inform members of upcoming events, breaking news, member recognition, and the latest innovations.  At least one group member would have to act as the group’s Twitter administrator and be responsible for sending tweets.  Group members should be encouraged to “follow” the other group members to fully experience the benefits of social networking like real-time discussions, member support, and member status updates.

External Web Sites

Credits

Stephanie Mooring