Twitter – A New Frontier

Twitter is a micro-blogging tool designed to share short messages with people who follow another person. Users can share anything that they can say in 140 characters. Twitter can be an effective tool for sending out quick messages to clients, prospects, and friends. In this article I will look at some popular ways to use Twitter and show their value in business, I will also show some areas where Twitter does not work so well in a business environment.

Twitter is a wonderful tool for sending out updates about things that a business is doing or a new article that has been posted. Updates should be no more than a couple times per-day or these updates because overwhelming to many users. Personally I try to twitter no more than once per-day.

There are many users of Twitter that like to update with every new project they start, food they eat or place that they go. For some this is fun and may even work for some businesses to draw attention. I know personally I can’t follow that much information about anyone during my work day. If we are going to make the Internet a productivity gain we cannot be distracted by constant updates by other users. I like what a user named heathr said “Hoping twitter's 900% growth isn't just one really ADD social media marketing person.”

You can easily create a chain of tweets (messages on Twitter) by adding a # and then a unique code. For example if you will be at a conference and want to let people make live comments about the conference you could have #conference and then follow that. Some conference are even encouraging this and announcing the feed at the conference. These are called hash codes.

Internet radio host like Susan Kildahl use Twitter to communicate with people during their shows. Many news shows on TV are letting viewers use Twitter to communicate with anchors. You can use hash codes to communicate with others but also if you go to someone’s Twitter page you can reply to their post. For example if you reply to me it would say @denverdataan.

Part of trying to use new technologies like Twitter is taking risks. Denver DataMan had a Twitter Sale where I asked users to reply to my tweet to get a very special sale. This did not work too well but that does not mean it could not work well for others.

Twitter’s phenomenal growth gives business an opportunity to try and use Twitter to make the most of the Internet. Reply and share your success stories or challenges.