My Life in 140 Characters or Less on Twitter | iNet inSights - Internet Answers that Give you the Advantage

My Life in 140 Characters or Less

7th March 2009

Regular readers of this blog and those that know me, will be aware that a couple of months ago I entered the marginal world of micro-blogging in the form of Twitter.

For those of you that aren’t in the know; where have you been? Twitter is a form of communication which allows you to post short messages to the Twitter website for your subscribers or “followers” to read. These short messages are called “Tweets” and can be up to 140 characters in length.

People who are interested in what you have to say can subscribe or “follow” your Tweets and in return you may “follow” theirs or you may “follow” other people’s “Tweets”. Eventually you end up with a whole network of people you are following and people who are following you, which results in an ever changing “timeline” of “Tweets”. It’s akin to being in a crowded room with everyone chatting simultaneously, but you can hear what everyone is saying.

Notable famous “Twitterers” include Stephen Fry, who has over 270,000 followers, Britney Spears and Jonathon Ross. Over the last 12 months these high profile celebrities have helped push what started out as a ‘geeks’ application into the mainstream with the service growing exponentially each day.

Now the cynical of you out there (which obviously includes Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt) are probably muttering “What’s the point?” or “It sounds like a waste of time! After all who’s going to be interested in the daily mutterings of what I have to say or even what a famous person has to say?”

To a certain extent you’re right and I used to think the same; however whether it’s the voyeuristic tendencies in me or whether it’s the human desire to ‘connect’ with others: I can say in all honesty, now that I’m into it, I have found Tweeting to be strangely addictive.

What makes Twitter great in my book is that unlike many other social networking sites, you don’t have to be tied to a computer to join in. Yes you can use your desktop machine or laptop to Tweet away quite merrily using a whole raft of Twitter tools and applications that have been produced by independent developers using Twitter’s freely available API. However one of the aspects I like is the ability to Tweet on the move using either SMS texts, email or for the iPhone and Blackberry addicted; mobile applications and a PDA friendly Twitter website. As such Twitter is probably the first social networking site that isn’t reliant upon its users being sat in front of a PC or Mac. In other words it’s truly social in its ability to be used mobile from many different devices.

Secondly, it’s very immediate. You can hold conversations with your followers in the same way as an internet messaging application like MSM Messenger or gTalk. However unlike these apps, your comments are made public. This encourages other people to join in, thus helping you to build your connections making new friends and business associates in the process.

Thirdly it’s fun and a great way to keep in contact with your real-world friends. Assuming you have any!

This is all very well and good you may say; but where are the business benefits for the typical business owner? How does it add value to one’s own marketing efforts and how does Twitter get your business more clients?

These are good and valid questions. I can only give you an answer based upon my experience to date. No doubt there are many seasoned Twitterers out there who could give a more comprehensive answer backed up by examples. However I’m not there yet! So what I have to say is this:

From what I can see is that Twitter is a good tool for building and maintaining relationships with clients and associates. I recently had a meeting with a new business associate whom I met over Twitter and one of his first comments to me when we met was “I feel like I know you already because of Twitter”. So in that respect Twitter proved a useful tool in breaking down barriers.
Secondly, I find Twitter good at driving visitors to both this blog and my website. I simply post a Tweet with a comment that provokes interest such as “Here’s what I think of XYZ [Link]” Tweets like this tend to provoke a click through to my site. I’m able to share my Tweets so that they appear in my LinkedIn status and my Facebook status simultaneously (using http://ping.fm) so that gives me even more exposure.
I’ve also found Twitter to be a useful resource in finding associates; for example I’ve been on the look out for a couple of good CSS web developers recently. Twitter came up trumps with two guys, both of whom are based within a 10 mile radius of my office. Spot on!

For those of you still sitting on the fence regarding the benefits of Twitter, here are a few resources on the web that may help you decide: all of these were sourced through my Twitter network.

Oh and don’t forget you can follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/inetengineers

Happy Tweeting.