What Can Twitter Do For You?

Are you tired of hearing bout twitter yet? Chances are, if you were one of the early adopters, you probably are. But if you are a celebrity, companies, or someone from outside of Silicon Valley, you might just now got on the bandwagon. If you don’t know what Twitter is, now is the time to.

First, a little history on how Twitter came to be. Om Malik wrote a blog post about how it all started so you should take a moment to read it. It was a classic case of a simple idea being implemented at the right place at the right time and given the right opportunity, which flourished into a web phenomenon.

I’m pretty sure that what made Twitter take off was its simplicity. You go to twitter.com, type in your email and desired username, and there – you have your very own twitter feed, and can start “tweeting” and following in just a few minutes. So how can you make Twitter work for you?

For Individuals
Get yourself and account on Twitter and start tweeting. Use Twitter Search as a tool to find out what the latest buzz is. Think of it as Yahoo! Answers meets Forums. Not only you tell the mass Twitterfolk what you are doing, thinking or eating, you are also tapping from them information, news, reviews, and opinions. Using Twitter’s recently improved search capability, you can track topics that you are interested in, like “Wii”, “Audi”, and “Shopping”. With the introduction of hashtags, you can filter your tweets based on your interests. If you blog, use one of the many Twitter apps out there like Twitterfeed will let you automatically post a Tweet when you update your blog. Let’s not forget all the “friends” you will be making. Granted, you don’t know them, but chances are, the more your tweet the more people with similar interests will “discover” you and start following you. Who knows, you might become a little bit of a Twitter Celebrity!

For Marketers
The popularity of Twitter warrants the need for marketers not to underestimate its power. Treat it as an additional OOMPH you can leverage to enhance your marketing game plan. What does Twitter have that email marketing, your website, banner ads, SEM don’t? Eyeballs. At any time of the day, people from all over the world, from every geographical location you can think of, they are there, being fed the 140 characters of text, auto refreshing every minute. A smart strategy that leverages this will most definitely yield positive results. Starbucks has used Twitter to conduct mini contests for their followers. MacHeist has used it to announce their macware bundles. The challenge is – what brilliant idea can you think of for your next project?

For the Enterprise
If you think Twitter is child’s play, and not feasible for enterprises, please take a moment to visit Starbucks, Zappos, Comcast, Threadless, CNN and view their Twitter feeds. They are just a small selection of the many companies now just starting to jump on the Twitter bandwagon. Either for marketing, customer service, or news, if you are looking for a better way to reach out to your user base or gain prospective customers, and even disseminate information to a wide audience, consider Twitter.

Moving forward
Yes, Twitter still doesn’t have a revenue generating model, based on functionality, it can’t compete with Facebook and other more mature social networks, and it is still pretty basic in its features, but take a look at the numbers – tremendous growth. Why? simplicity, flexibility and portability. It takes seconds to get yourself and account, and you can update and access your tweets from almost any medium, SMS, IM, web. What’s left is for you to figure out how you can use it to your advantage.